Metricool Free Plan Limits (2026): One Brand, 20 Posts a Month, and Two Networks You Cannot Buy At All

The Metricool free plan is genuinely usable, and it is smaller than almost everyone expects in one specific way that has nothing to do with the number of posts. The posts you can count. The exclusion you have to read for.

Here is the sentence, from the free column of the pricing page: "Manage all your brands' social networks (except LinkedIn and Twitter)." Read it as written. On the free tier, LinkedIn and X are not limited, throttled or restricted — they are absent, and there is no amount you can pay at that tier to add them.

What free actually gets you, in three numbers

One brand. Twenty posts a month. Nine platforms rather than eleven, because the two above are gone.

That first number deserves a moment. In Metricool's vocabulary a brand is not an account — it is a whole set of social profiles belonging to one entity. So "one brand" on the free tier can mean an Instagram, a Facebook page, a TikTok and a Pinterest all managed together, which makes the free plan considerably more generous than a one-account plan would be, right up until you need a second brand or a second client.

The second number, twenty posts a month, is the one that actually ends most free-tier stories. Twenty is a fortnight of daily posting on a single platform, or about five days across four. It is enough to evaluate the product properly and not enough to run anything on.

The third is the one to check first, because it is a yes-or-no filter rather than a budget question. If your plan involves LinkedIn or X, this free tier is not a smaller version of the paid one — it is a different product with two platforms removed.

A quota you can outgrow is a pricing decision. A platform that is simply absent is a filter. Apply the filters before you compare any numbers.

Worth noting for completeness: even on paid tiers, X is listed as an add-on rather than an included platform. That places Metricool alongside several competitors that all handle X differently — one bundles it only on paid subscriptions and says the reason is X's enterprise API cost, another leaves it out of its multi-platform bundle entirely, another splits free and premium X profiles into two rows with different analytics. Wherever X shows up as its own line item, an upstream cost is being passed to you.

The trap is not the free tier. It is the word "from" on the next one.

This is the part that makes the free-plan page worth reading even if you are certain you will pay. Starter is not a price. It is a sub-ladder. So is Advanced.

Take the top annual-euro figure into a comparison table as "Starter, 16 euro" and you have understated the real bill by anywhere from about 45 percent to several hundred percent, depending on where in the ladder your brand count lands. Any time a pricing card says "from", there is a sub-ladder behind it and you have not found the price yet.

Two more warnings attached to that table. First, the euro and dollar columns are not conversions of each other. Sixteen euro maps to twenty dollars, a ratio of 1.25; sixty-nine euro maps to one hundred and seven dollars, a ratio of 1.55. A single exchange rate cannot produce both. They are two independently maintained price lists, so pick the column that matches your billing currency and never translate between them. Second, the annual discount itself is not flat — it widens as you climb, so a headline "save up to 24 percent" is only true at the top of the ladder.

And the per-brand arithmetic is flatter than the tiers make it look. Across the annual euro column the average works out from roughly 3.20 down to 2.60 per brand, which reads like a volume discount. The marginal price — what the next brand actually costs you — sits on a near-flat line in the low-to-mid two euros the whole way. Your sixth brand and your fiftieth brand cost about the same. Averages descend; the price of your next unit barely moves.

The AI credits multiply, and the card does not say so

AI assistant credits are quoted at 5, 20 and 35 per brand per month across the tiers. Per brand. That phrase does all the work.

Compare the top two allowances as printed and you get 20 versus 35, a difference of 1.75 times — which is what a quick scan of the card will leave in your head. Now multiply by brand ceilings: an Advanced plan at fifty brands carries 1,750 credits a month, against a Starter at five brands carrying 100. The real distance between those two configurations is a factor of about 8.75, not 1.75.

The practical rule: when a quota is expressed "per brand", "per channel" or "per workspace", the comparison figure is always the per-unit number multiplied by the units your configuration will actually hold — never the number as printed.

Two figures that other write-ups quote are deliberately missing from this article. Metricool's X add-on has been reported at ten dollars a month per account and its hashtag tracker at twenty-five dollars a day; neither reproduced on the page this week — the page carries the words "Access to the X add-on" and no amount at all. So those cells stay empty here rather than getting filled from an older capture. If you need those numbers, get them from your own billing screen, with the date written next to them.

The last line on the page, and what it tells you about the category

At the bottom of the paid columns sits Unlimited content publishing*, and the asterisk resolves to: "* Unlimited scheduling may be limited by our Fair Use Policy."

There is no number anywhere on that page. Not a cap, not a threshold, not a per-platform table — a word, an asterisk and a link. Which is a fair enough way to run a policy, and it is also the single most important thing to understand about the word "unlimited" in this category: it is not one product. Different vendors mean measurably different things by it, and the difference is always written under the asterisk rather than on the card. Some publish an absolute ceiling in their FAQ. Some publish a full per-platform daily table. This one publishes neither.

So the honest summary of the free tier is: one brand, twenty posts a month, no LinkedIn and no X — and the honest summary of the step above it is that you will have to find your own position on a sub-ladder before you know the price.

FAQ

Can I add LinkedIn or X to the Metricool free plan by paying for just that?

No. The free column excludes both networks outright, and there is no add-on path at that tier — the exclusion is a property of the plan rather than a quota you can top up. X reappears on the paid tiers as an add-on, which means a separate line on the bill rather than an included network. Budget for that separately if X is part of your plan.

Is twenty posts a month per brand or in total?

It is the free plan's allowance, and the free plan includes exactly one brand, so the distinction does not bite until you upgrade. What does matter is that a brand can contain several networks, so twenty posts spread across four connected profiles is five posts each. That arithmetic is the reason most people reach the ceiling faster than they expect.

Should I read this or the article about Metricool alternatives?

They answer different questions and are meant to be read in sequence. This one answers "what does the free plan give me, and what does the next step actually cost" — useful when you want to stay. Metricool free alternatives answers "who else does this and where are their gates" — useful when you have decided to leave. Read this one first: knowing which wall you hit is what makes the alternatives list meaningful rather than a shopping catalogue.

A five-minute check before you upgrade

1. List your platforms and cross off the absent ones. LinkedIn and X are not limits on the free tier; they are omissions. Filters before budgets.
2. Count your brands, then find the sub-rung. Six brands is a different price from five, and the card will not tell you that until you interact with it.
3. Stay in one currency column. The euro and dollar lists are independent, not converted.
4. Multiply the per-brand quotas. Credits, feeds and anything else quoted per unit scales with your brand count, and the card's headline comparison does not.
5. Find the asterisk and read what "unlimited" means here. If the footnote has no number, treat the ceiling as unknown rather than absent.

One structural note to close on, because it is what the brand unit is really telling you. Metricool is built around managing a small number of entities well — one brand, five brands, fifty brands, each with a coherent set of profiles. If your shape is the other one, many accounts on the same platform each needing content that differs from the others, a brand-metered dashboard will price you badly no matter which rung you pick. NoobClaw is built for that second shape: a desktop app where every account signs in locally in its own fingerprinted browser profile, generates from its own niche and persona, and runs on randomised timing with daily caps and rest days. It is not a hosted platform and not a set-and-forget content factory; the platforms' own rules still apply to every account, and review stays with you. Membership pricing is whatever the site and the app show today.

Elsewhere on the same product: the two currency columns are pulled apart in Metricool pricing in euros vs dollars, the cheaper-options question is in Metricool cheaper alternative, and the free-versus-free comparison against the platform's own tool is in Metricool vs Meta Business Suite.