Method and sources

• Monthly cost = plan price (monthly, or the annual per-month equivalent) + extra social accounts, users or social sets at the add-on price the tool publishes.
• A plan fits when its stated limits, plus any published add-ons, hold your accounts and users. Where extras are 'customizable' or unpriced (Vista Social, Publer members, Later Starter), the plan is counted only up to its limit.
• Buffer and Publer price per account; Publer's every 10th account is free. Hootsuite prices per user. Later sells profiles in social sets (one of each network): we count sets as accounts ÷ 8, rounded up, which assumes your accounts spread across networks.
• Hootsuite's pricing cards are shown in EUR to our server; its USD prices are read from the same page's HTML (FAQ: 'Paid plans start at $99…'), which are per user, billed annually. No monthly-billing price is published as a number, so the annual rate is used and flagged. Sendible publishes no annual number; the monthly price is used and flagged.
• Annual totals shown per year are divided by 12 (SocialBee, Vista Social). Not counted: AI credit packs, listening, white-label and other add-ons, taxes.
• Every number has a verbatim evidence snippet; a daily refresh re-renders each pricing page (including the monthly/annual toggle) and logs any mismatch for a human. Data is never changed automatically.
• Rankings are by total monthly cost, then name. Affiliate status is never read by the calculator (tested).

Sources

• https://buffer.com/pricing (render)
• https://www.hootsuite.com/plans (text)
• https://later.com/pricing/ (render)
• https://socialbee.com/pricing/ (render)
• https://publer.com/pricing (render)
• https://www.socialpilot.co/plans (render)
• https://vistasocial.com/pricing/ (render)
• https://www.sendible.com/pricing (render)
• https://contentstudio.io/pricing (render)