There are roughly 40 tweet scheduling apps you can buy right now. Every one of them costs at least $9 a month. The cheapest "real" one — Buffer's starter plan — is $5/mo and limits you to 3 channels and 10 scheduled posts.
I'm selling Slap Post at $1.99/mo. Here's the math on why that's not a typo, and why the category needed one.
The thing nobody asks
When you read about a $19/mo SaaS tool, the assumption is: "well, those features have to cost something to build." The unspoken claim is that the price reflects engineering value.
That's not what's happening in tweet scheduling. The category is priced based on what a marketing team at a small B2B agency will pay. Agencies have line-item budgets. $19/mo per tool times 4 tools is $912/year on someone else's credit card. It barely registers.
Indie hackers are not agencies. We're paying out of pocket for tools we use 4 times a month. A $19/mo tool that we use 4 times a month is a $4.75/use tool. That math gets noticed.
The actual unit cost
I ran the numbers. The cost to me per Slap Post subscriber:
- X API plain post: $0.015 each × 60 posts/mo cap = $0.90/mo
- Apple's 30% cut on $1.99 = $0.60/mo
- Supabase + Netlify + iOS Keychain + Vault: rounds to ~$0.05/mo per active user at scale
- Customer support load (estimated): one ticket per 80 users per month, ~15 min each = call it $0.10/mo amortized
Total cost: roughly $1.65/mo per subscriber.
Slap Post grosses $1.39/mo after Apple's cut. So at the cap, I'm losing $0.26/mo per user on the API alone.
So why ship it
Two reasons.
One, most users won't hit the cap. Real posting behavior across the test group has been about 32 posts a month, not 60. At 32 posts that's $0.48/mo in API costs, total cost ~$1.23/mo. I clear about $0.16/mo per user. Not a lot, but not negative.
Two, the cheap tweet scheduler doesn't have to clear $19/mo per user to be viable. It has to clear enough to keep the lights on while the actual business model emerges. The actual business model is probably: most Slap Post users will eventually also want a smarter "where do I reply" tool, which is what Slap Social is. The funnel matters more than the unit economics on this one app.
Why the URL rule is a feature
X charges $0.20 for a scheduled post containing a URL — 13× the plain post rate. If I let users include URLs:
- 60 URL posts/mo would cost me $12/mo per user. At $1.99/mo gross, that's catastrophic.
- I'd have to charge $19/mo just to cover URL posts. I'd be Hootsuite.
- Or I could shadow-cap URL posts at like 5/mo, which is the worst kind of "feature."
Instead I shipped the constraint: no URL posts, ever. The price is a feature of the constraint. Without the constraint, the price isn't possible.
What this means for you
If you're already paying $9-19/mo for a tweet scheduler and using it twice a week, you might be the exact customer for this. The math at $1.99/mo:
- Annual cost: $23.88
- vs Buffer starter ($5/mo): $60/year — save $36
- vs Hypefury ($19/mo): $228/year — save $204
- vs Hootsuite ($99/mo): too embarrassing to type
That's not a "saving money" play — that's a "stop overpaying for features you don't use" play.
What you DON'T get
Worth being explicit. Slap Post does not have:
- AI tweet rewrites (write your own, the bot voice is a tell)
- Multi-account support (one account per subscription — this is X scheduling, not agency posting)
- Engagement analytics (X already shows you this, you don't need a second dashboard)
- Reply automation (please don't)
- Thread builder (use X's native one, ours wouldn't be better)
- URL posts (see above)
- Image attachments (V1 ships plain text only — coming later if demand)
What it does have: a composer, a schedule, a queue, a 60-post cap, and your X account.
Why I think this works
The best comparison I keep landing on is @levelsio's Photo AI — a tool that does one extremely specific thing for less than competitors charge, gets criticized for "lacking features," and prints money because the people who want THAT specific thing are willing to pay for it being THAT specific.
Slap Post is the photo-AI of tweet scheduling. One button. One cap. $1.99.
If that math doesn't pencil out for you, that's fine — the $19/mo tools are a phone call away. But if you've ever looked at a Buffer invoice and thought "I literally use this for one thing, this is ridiculous," Slap Post was built for you.
Slap Post — $1.99/mo iOS tweet scheduler, 60 plain-text posts per month, no URLs. Built in the cracks between a day job and bedtime by @jessyka_boat.