I Quit My Job to Build an Open Source Social Media Scheduler

Sev — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:36:58 +0000

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working on an open-source social media scheduler for the past 110 days, and I’d love to share it with you.

For the first two months, I juggled this project alongside my 5-9 job. But then I realized I wanted to go all-in, so I saved up, quit my job, and committed to building something better.

There are plenty of schedulers out there, including another open-source one (Postiz). But after trying different options such as Metricool, Buffer, Post-Bridge, Qayle, and others, I kept running into the same problems.

The main problem with the existing tools is that their UI sucks.

Okay, to not be so harsh, their UI has a lot of things that can be improved. The main issues are:

Clunky UI: slow, cluttered, and filled with unnecessary features.
Too many clicks.
Poor UX choices - pop ups, distractions, and bloat that et in the way of content creation.

I wanted a minimalist yet powerful tool, something that:

has a clean, fast, and intuitive UI
focuses on essential features
encourages content creation, not just scheduling (this is important)
loads quickly and works smoothly, so you don't have to slow down your thinking having to wait when another pop up loads or when the save button finally finishes saving

The closest tool to my vision is Typefully, but it’s expensive, mainly focused on text, and still has room for UX improvements (selecting platforms for a post is unnecessarily complicated process). My tool is heavily inspired by Typefully but aims to refine the experience even further.

Unlike other schedulers that overwhelm users with branding and unnecessary visuals, I see this as a productivity tool, similar to Excel. It should just work, with as little friction as possible.

One of my biggest frustrations was switching between note-taking apps (like Obsidian) and my scheduler. I wanted a space where I could brainstorm, draft, and refine content, where I can see my past content and future content and I can relate them to one another. That’s another key problem this tool is solving.

I still use Obsidian to write and take notes, but I don't use it to create specific platform content/posts anymore. I've. designed my tool to be the hub for that. Obsidian for me is more of a general purpose not taking app. I usually open it alongside my app and create the platform-specific content directly in the app.

That being said, the tool is currently in beta and free to use. I'm looking for early users who can:

try it out and see if it fits your workflow
share feedback and help me shape the future of the app
report bugs and suggest improvements.

I plan to keep it free for a few more months before finalizing a monetization strategy.

If you're interested, feel free to sign up and use it. You can also self-host or contribute to the open-source project (though proper documentation is still a work in progress).

Thank you for taking the time to read! 🚀

app: https://publora.com/
github: https://github.com/sevleo/BrandCraft

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please let me know what you think!

P.S. If interested, join the discord group! The link to discord is on the landing page of the app.

Cheers,

Sev

Should I Open Source My Project If a Better Alternative Exists?

Sev — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 08:13:18 +0000

Hey everyone! This is my first post in the Dev community, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on something I’ve been debating.

For the past three months, I’ve been building my own social media scheduler, and recently, I started considering making it open source. My thinking was that the code itself isn’t that valuable to keep private, and open-sourcing would allow developers who don’t want to pay for a tool like this to self-host it instead.

But here’s the dilemma:
I just discovered Postiz—an open-source project that does exactly what my tool does, but better. It’s already well-developed, has extensive documentation, and was built by a more experienced developer using NestJS and a more modularized architecture.

So now I’m wondering:
Does it still make sense for me to go open source? Would anyone actually want to contribute or use my project when there’s already a superior alternative?

That said, I still want to keep working on my project because:

I believe in my own vision and like having control over the app I use.
My project is more beginner-friendly since I built it with a simpler stack. Backend: Pure Node.js/JavaScript (no NestJS). Frontend: Vue.

Because of this, I think it has a lower learning curve and is easier to customize.

So, what do you think?
Would open-sourcing still make sense in this case? Or should I take a different approach?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

DEV Community: Sev

I Quit My Job to Build an Open Source Social Media Scheduler

Should I Open Source My Project If a Better Alternative Exists?