Buffer
The company that publishes its own CEO's salary online, by formula, and once told the public its revenue had dropped 20% over four straight years — before actually turning it around.
What is Buffer?
Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich founded Buffer in November 2010 as a simple scheduling tool for Twitter, and it grew from there into a broader social media toolkit now used by more than 200,000 creators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses each month. What Buffer became known for almost as much as the product itself is a company culture built around "default to transparency" — since 2013, anyone can go to buffer.com/salaries and see every employee's pay, including Gascoigne's own, calculated by a public formula rather than private negotiation. The company also publishes its revenue publicly and has stayed fully remote since early on, after visa issues pushed the founders out of the U.S. and into a distributed way of working that never reversed.
That same instinct for candor showed up again more recently: Gascoigne has spoken publicly about a genuinely difficult stretch where Buffer's annual recurring revenue declined 20% over four consecutive years, dropping to roughly $17.1 million, before the team turned it around and pushed ARR back up to around $22.3 million. It's a rare thing for a software company to say out loud rather than quietly patch over. On the product side, Buffer still runs on a channel-based pricing model rather than the contact-based approach common in email tools — each connected social account, whether it's a Facebook Page, an Instagram profile, or a LinkedIn company page, counts as one billable channel, and the price scales with how many are connected rather than list size or send volume.
Company history and financial figures are drawn from Buffer's own public transparency pages and Joel Gascoigne's public talks and interviews through 2026; pricing reflects Buffer's published rates.
Key features
Visual content calendar
Drag-and-drop scheduling across every connected channel in one shared view.
AI Assistant
Drafts captions, repurposes existing posts, and suggests hashtags, included from the free plan up.
Start Page
A simple, Buffer-hosted link-in-bio page bundled with every plan.
Approval workflows
Draft, review, and sign-off steps before a post goes live, on the Team plan.
Analytics & branded reports
Performance tracking per channel, exportable as client-ready reports on Team.
Public API (beta)
Free access for publishing, messaging, and analytics, rate-limited by plan.
Pricing
Free
- 10 scheduled posts per channel, AI Assistant and Start Page included
- Lifetime limit of 8 unique channels ever connected to the account
- No analytics beyond basic post performance
Essentials
- Unlimited scheduled posts per channel
- Full analytics, engagement tools, and content planning
- Volume discount kicks in automatically past 10 connected channels
Team
- Unlimited team members, access levels, approval workflows
- Branded, exportable reports — Buffer's former Agency tier is now folded in here
- Custom permissions and draft collaboration for larger teams
Pricing is per connected channel, not per contact or subscriber. Past 10 channels, the volume discount applies retroactively to every channel on the account, not just the 11th and beyond, which can cut the effective rate substantially for agencies. A 50% nonprofit discount is available on any paid plan, and both paid tiers include a 14-day free trial.
What counts as a channel
Integrations & platforms
Pros, cons & best for
Pros
- Genuinely usable free plan, unusual for the category, with AI Assistant included
- Per-channel pricing is transparent and simple to calculate before signing up
- The volume discount past 10 channels applies to the whole account, not just the excess
Cons
- Interactive engagement and inbox features cost more than the base publishing price on their own
- Per-channel billing adds up fast for agencies managing many small clients under 10 channels each
- The former standalone Agency plan is gone; agencies now share the Team tier with regular teams
Best for
- Solo creators and small businesses managing a handful of channels
- Teams that want simple, predictable per-channel math over a flat platform fee
- Not the pick for a large agency under 10 channels per client wanting the old dedicated Agency pricing
Take a look inside
Alternatives
For a flat platform fee instead of per-channel pricing:
Our verdict
Buffer's transparency isn't just a nice story, it's a useful lens for judging the product itself: the pricing page says exactly what a channel costs, and the math is easy to check before signing up, which is more than most social tools in this category offer. That simplicity has a real limit, though. Per-channel billing works well for a creator or small business with a handful of accounts, but it stops being the cheapest option the moment an agency manages many clients at under 10 channels apiece, since Buffer's volume discount only kicks in once the whole account crosses that threshold. The company's own public admission of a four-year revenue slide is oddly reassuring rather than damaging — it suggests a team that reports its numbers honestly rather than only in growth years, which lines up with how directly the pricing itself is presented. Good value for individuals and small teams who want predictable, transparent per-channel costs. Less competitive for agencies juggling many small clients, where a flat-rate competitor may work out cheaper.
FAQ
What exactly counts as a "channel" in Buffer's pricing?
Each connected social account, such as one Facebook Page, one Instagram profile, or one LinkedIn Page, counts as a separate billable channel — there's no bundling across platforms.
Does the volume discount apply to all channels or just the extra ones?
Once an account crosses 11 connected channels, the lower per-channel rate applies retroactively to every channel on the account, not only the ones past the 10th.
Can I really see Buffer employees' salaries, including the CEO's?
Yes — Buffer has published salary information, including CEO Joel Gascoigne's own pay and the formula used to calculate it, publicly since 2013.
Did Buffer's revenue actually decline at some point?
Yes — Gascoigne has spoken publicly about a four-year stretch where annual recurring revenue fell 20% to roughly $17.1 million, before the company grew it back to about $22.3 million.
Is there still a dedicated Agency plan?
No — Buffer eliminated its separate Agency tier in December 2025 and folded its features into the Team plan.
Is the free plan actually usable, or just a trial?
It's a genuinely standing free plan, not a time-limited trial, though it caps out at 3 connected channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel, and a lifetime limit of 8 unique channels ever connected.