Job ticket 628053 · smb · switchboard · no subscription
Hootsuite is US$99 per user per month. What most teams buy is the wall chart.
This page is a switchboard for the multi-account month. Paste your accounts with their voice lines, the month's real events, and your honest capacity, and a free-tier model patches the board: every post slotted with account, day, format and working copy — load arithmetic printed, repurposing chains marked, empty days left honestly empty. A second prompt writes the reply playbook: macros in voice, and escalation lines for what a macro must never answer. Post natively; the coordination was the product.
Hootsuite is a trademark of Hootsuite Inc. This is an independent, unaffiliated comparison built on Hootsuite's own plans page, linked below and re-read every thirty days.
The board — rendered in this browser
Sample data is illustrative, not a claim about Hootsuite. Every Hootsuite figure on this page comes from the linked pricing page, read 2026-09-27.
The prompt pack
Two prompts, each mapped one-to-one onto a Hootsuite feature you are currently rationed on. Run them from this page with a free key, or copy them into any free chat model — the text is identical either way, and it is printed in full at the bottom of this section so it survives this site.
Loading the pack from tools.json… If this fails, the full prompt text is still readable below.
One-time unlocks only, never a subscription. If a price ever appears here it was read from Stripe in that request, not typed by hand. An unlock is client-side gating, not secure payment verification: it is stored in this browser and cannot prove payment to anyone else.
What Hootsuite's own pricing page says
Read from hootsuite.com/plans on 2026-09-27. Fields we could not read are marked unconfirmed rather than filled in with a plausible number.
| The job | Hootsuite (14-day trial) | Standard (US$99/user/mo annual) | This page + a free-tier model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | US$0 for 14 days, posting caps in the trial fine print | US$99 per user/month, annual billing basis, 10 social accounts | US$0 forever. A free-tier key costs nothing; the prompts are yours. |
| The month calendar | Their planner, briefly | Planner across 10 accounts | Prompt 1's board: slots with voice-true copy lines, capacity arithmetic printed, chains marked ↻ |
| Inbox consistency | Their inbox, briefly | Shared inbox tooling | Prompt 2's playbook: MACRO / PERSONALIZE / ESCALATE cards in each account's voice |
| Auto-publishing | Yes — the genuinely hard part | Yes, plus analytics and listening | No. You post natively or via any scheduler — the OAuth keys to your accounts were the price this page refuses |
What this replaces, and what it does not
A displacement claim you cannot substantiate is a lie with good typography. This is the whole scope, including the parts where Hootsuite wins.
Replaced: the coordination layer
The month across all accounts on one board, balanced against hours you actually have — with the spare rack catching overflow instead of your Tuesdays.
Replaced: voice governance
Per-account voice lines enforced on every copy line and every macro — the same news, told twice, correctly differently.
Replaced: the inbox playbook
Consistent answers whoever's holding the phone, plus the escalation lines that keep macros away from legal, medical, harassment and press.
NOT a publisher
No account connections, no scheduled sends, no APIs. Publishing needs OAuth to every network — that access is Hootsuite's real product and this page's refused price.
NOT analytics or listening
No engagement data, no brand monitoring, no best-time-to-post claims. Those need live platform data this page does not have and will not fake.
NOT the Buffer desk
This catalog's Buffer page builds a single-stream posting queue with per-network variants. The switchboard is for the multi-account month and the shared inbox — the coordination problem. Use whichever matches your actual problem.
The prompts, in full, as text
Copy these into any model. They are the product; the page around them is convenience. Each block is the exact system prompt the interactive runner sends, plus the user-message template.
Prompt 01 — 1. Month switchboard · hootsuite-month-board v1.0.0 · best ally: Google Gemini API — Free usage tier · gemini-2.5-flash-lite
Replaces: The cross-account content calendar Hootsuite's planner hosts from US$99/user/month: every planned post with account, day, format and working copy, balanced against stated capacity.
Why this model: The board is constraint satisfaction over accounts × days × capacity with voice rules attached; it needs everything in context simultaneously and a schema to keep every post slot attributable — long-context JSON work, not creative work. Fallback ally: Copy-Paste Relay.
System prompt (1861 chars):
You plan one month of social posting across multiple accounts. You are a switchboard operator: every post gets an account, a day, a format and a working copy line in that account's stated voice — and the total load never exceeds the capacity the team stated. An over-planned calendar is a lie that collapses by week two.
Return ONLY one JSON object. No markdown fences, no commentary, no preamble.
{
"kicker": string (max 8 words: the month),
"title": string (max 8 words),
"subhead": string (max 20 words: total posts planned vs stated capacity, printed as arithmetic),
"items": [
{ "title": string (format: "<Day> <date> · <account>" as inferable from input), "tag": string (the account's short name, uppercase), "body": string (max 45 words: format (post/thread/story/article), the working copy line or hook in the account's stated voice, and '↻ repurposes:' when this content chains from another slot) }
],
"notes": [ string (max 32 words each) ]
}
Hard rules:
1. Total planned items must fit the stated capacity, and the subhead prints the arithmetic ('14 posts vs your stated ~15/month'). Overflow ideas go into a note titled spare rack, not onto days.
2. Every slot ties to something real from the input: a stated event, a repurposing chain, or a stated recurring series. No generic #MondayMotivation filler — an empty day is honest; filler is not.
3. Voice discipline: copy lines must obey each account's stated voice line; when two accounts carry the same news, the copy differs per voice — never cross-posted verbatim unless the input allows it.
4. Repurposing chains are explicit: mark the source slot and the derived slots with '↻'. Chains are how small teams survive multi-account months.
5. One note names the month's single most load-bearing slot (the one to protect if a week collapses).
6. Write in the language of the input.
User message template:
Variables:
{{accounts}}— Accounts + voice lines (max 1200 chars) sample data shipped with the tool{{month_events}}— The month's real events (max 2000 chars) sample data shipped with the tool{{capacity}}— Honest capacity (max 400 chars) sample data shipped with the tool
Output schema (the answer must match this exactly):
Decoding: temperature 0.35 · max 1700 output tokens · responseMimeType application/json · budget ~1,500 in / ~1,000 out per month · cost per run: 1 request a month against Gemini's free daily allowance — the US$1,188/year planner, twelve pastes a year.
Prompt 02 — 2. Reply playbook · hootsuite-reply-playbook v1.0.0 · best ally: Groq Cloud — free tier · llama-3.3-70b-versatile
Replaces: The shared-inbox consistency Hootsuite sells to teams: per-scenario reply macros in each account's voice, with escalation lines for what a macro must never answer.
Why this model: Macro writing is many small bounded compositions against fixed voice rules — fast instruct output, easily re-run when the inbox invents a new recurring question. Fallback ally: Copy-Paste Relay.
System prompt (1732 chars):
You write a social reply playbook: response macros for the messages a team actually receives, in each account's stated voice, so whoever holds the inbox answers consistently. You also draw the line macros must never cross.
Return ONLY one JSON object. No markdown fences, no commentary.
{
"kicker": string (max 8 words),
"title": string (max 8 words),
"subhead": string (max 18 words),
"items": [
{ "title": string (max 10 words: the scenario, from the pasted messages), "tag": string (one of MACRO | PERSONALIZE | ESCALATE), "body": string (max 55 words: MACRO — the reply verbatim, ready to paste, in the account's voice, with [brackets] for variable bits; PERSONALIZE — the skeleton plus which detail MUST be human-added and why; ESCALATE — who owns it, from the input, and the holding line to send meanwhile) }
],
"notes": [ string (max 30 words each) ]
}
Hard rules:
1. Every scenario comes from the pasted message examples. Do not invent scenarios the team didn't show; a playbook for imaginary messages teaches nothing.
2. ESCALATE is mandatory for: legal threats, medical/safety claims, harassment, press inquiries, and anything about a named employee. If none appear in the paste, add one note saying these categories always escalate anyway — with a holding line for each of the first two.
3. Complaint macros never argue facts in public: acknowledge, own what's owned, move specifics to a private channel — and say so within the macro.
4. Voice rules from the input apply to every macro; a support reply in the wrong voice reads as a different company.
5. No engagement-bait ('Great question! 🙌') unless the account's stated voice explicitly permits it.
6. Write in the language of the pasted messages.
User message template:
Variables:
{{accounts}}— Accounts + voices (max 1200 chars) sample data shipped with the tool{{messages}}— Real messages, anonymized (max 6000 chars) sample data shipped with the tool{{owners}}— Who owns what (max 600 chars) sample data shipped with the tool
Output schema (the answer must match this exactly):
Decoding: temperature 0.35 · max 1400 output tokens · responseMimeType application/json · budget ~1,600 in / ~800 out per playbook · cost per run: 1 request per revision — quarterly for most inboxes — a rounding error on Groq's published base.
Questions worth asking before you cancel
Does this need an API key?
No — copy either prompt into any free chat model and paste the JSON back; the board renders locally. A free Gemini key just removes the hop.
What does Hootsuite actually cost?
Per the plans page 2026-09-27: Standard US$99/user/month with 10 social accounts, Professional US$199 with unlimited accounts, Advanced US$399 — all footnoted 'in USD, based on annual billing'; monthly-billing figures weren't printed and stay unconfirmed. No free plan exists; the 14-day trial carries daily posting caps in the fine print.
How do the posts actually get published?
Natively, from the board: each slot's copy line is written to be pasted into the platform's own composer — which every network provides free, several with built-in scheduling. The board is the wall chart; your thumbs remain the API, and no third party holds your account keys.
Buffer desk or this one?
One brand voice feeding a queue of posts: Buffer desk. Several accounts with different voices, a month to coordinate, and an inbox more than one person answers: this one. They're different problems and this catalog refuses to blur them into one page.
Send this to someone still paying for it
Nothing is loaded from X or LinkedIn until you click, and no share is counted, logged or reported back to us — the buttons are plain links to each network's own share page.