Postly
Open source · free to self-host

Your social media, on autopilot

Describe your business once. Postly writes the posts, makes the artwork, and publishes them on your schedule — while you get on with the actual work.

No credit card Free tier is enough Your data stays yours

One place to publish everywhere

What you get

Everything between an idea and a published post

Not a caption generator you still have to copy and paste. Postly does the whole job — writes it, illustrates it, schedules it, sends it, and checks it landed.

Copy that sounds like a person

The hook is capped at twelve words and every post must carry one concrete detail — a number, a time of day, a real moment. A ban list kills the dead phrases. Your own rules override all of it.

Artwork made for the post

A real photographic scene matched to the caption, not a stock image. The frame that becomes the thumbnail is composed for it — subject close, face readable, background thrown away.

Posts on time

Your own timezone, stable across daylight saving. A missed run is caught up, not lost.

Approve or automate

Every post can wait for your edit, or go straight out. Set it per automation.

Recovers by itself

Transient failures retry on a backoff. Real refusals stop and explain themselves.

Counts what actually exists

A platform accepting a post is not the same as publishing it. Postly reads the real outcome back, so the dashboard shows what is live — not what was sent.

Your keys, your quota

Bring your own Groq, OpenAI, Gemini or Anthropic key. Encrypted at rest, never sent to the browser, and the free tiers are genuinely enough.

How it works

Three things to set up. Then nothing.

The whole point is that you stop thinking about it. Setup takes about ten minutes.

Describe your business

Pick a business type to start from, then say what you sell, who buys it and why. Add the rules the AI must always follow — that is what stops posts sounding generic.

Connect your accounts

One click per platform. No developer app to register, no API keys to chase, no waiting on a review process.

Set the hours and leave

Choose how many posts a day and when. Postly writes them, makes the artwork, and publishes on time — catching up anything it misses.

Open source

Yours to read, change and run

Every line is public. Run it on your own machine, change what you like, or just read it to see exactly what happens to your data. The AGPL means anyone who modifies Postly and runs it as a service has to share their changes too — so it cannot quietly become somebody else's closed product.

Questions

The things people ask first

Is it really free?

The software is free and open source under the AGPL. Running it is free too — the hobby tiers of Vercel and Neon, plus a free Groq key, cover everything. You only pay if you outgrow those, and you can self-host it anywhere instead.

Do I need a developer app for each platform?

No. Accounts connect through an aggregator, so connecting Pinterest or Instagram is a single click. Direct OAuth is supported too if you would rather run your own apps.

Will the posts sound like a robot wrote them?

That is where most of the work went. The hook is capped at twelve words, every post must carry one concrete detail, and a ban list kills the phrases that make copy sound like it could be selling anything. Your own rules override all of it, and you can read and edit every post before it goes out.

What if a post fails to publish?

A timeout is not a rejection, so transient failures are retried on a growing backoff. A real refusal stops immediately and tells you why in words you can act on. Either way it appears in Review rather than disappearing.

Can I run it on my own server?

Yes, and the licence protects that. It is a single Next.js app plus Postgres — no Docker, no queue, no orchestrator. If you modify it and run it as a public service, the AGPL asks you to publish your changes.

What happens to my data?

It stays in your database. API keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM and never reach the browser. No advertising, no cross-site tracking, no selling anything to anyone.

Stop writing posts at midnight

Set it up once. Let it run.

Start free

No credit card. Nothing to cancel.