I ran an agency in Jakarta for a few years. Every client engagement had the same first two weeks: figure out what they should post, build a month of content, set up a calendar, then spend the next 30 days chasing them for approvals and answering the same Instagram DMs over and over.
Different client, same two weeks. Every time.
So I'm building the thing that does it. It's called bleam. It generates a month of social content from your business details, publishes it to Instagram, TikTok and Google Business Profile, and handles the DMs that come back.
This post is about what's free and what isn't, because "freemium" is a word that gets a lot of side-eye, deservedly, and I'd rather be straight about where I drew the line and why.
What's free
No card, no trial clock.
- Scheduling: Instagram, TikTok, Google Business Profile. Queue posts, pick times, done.
- One workspace: Enough to run a single business properly.
- Basic caption generation: Give it a topic, get a caption in your brand voice.
- The Instagram audit: Point it at any public account and it tells you where the sales are leaking. No signup required for this one at all.
That's a usable product. You can run a small business on it and never pay me anything.
What's behind the paywall
Here's the part people usually fudge.
- Full content generation: A month of posts and carousels in one sitting, not one caption at a time.
- Comment-to-DM automation: Someone comments a keyword on your post, they get your catalog in their DMs in about two seconds. This is the feature that actually makes people money.
- Multiple workspaces: For operators running five to fifteen client accounts.
- White labeling: Your branding on the client-facing pieces.
- Bulk generation and approval queues: The stuff that only matters when you're managing volume.
Why the line is there
Two reasons, and one of them is unflattering.
The honest one: scheduling is not a product anymore. Meta Business Suite does it for free and does it fine. Charging for scheduling in 2026 is charging for something the platform gives away, and everyone figures that out eventually. So I'd rather give it away deliberately than pretend it's worth money.
The unflattering one: content generation costs me real money per user. Every carousel is inference. Every generated caption is tokens. A free tier that includes unlimited generation is a free tier that gets more expensive the more people love it.
I watched RB2B learn this in public. They gave away person-level visitor identification on their free plan, grew enormously on it, then had to claw it back in January because the free feature was also the most expensive thing they shipped. It worked as a land grab. It did not work as a business.
So the rule I'm following: free gets the parts that cost me nothing, paid gets the parts that cost me something or make you money. Scheduling costs me a database row. Comment-to-DM makes you sales. Those are different things and they should be priced differently.
The part I don't know yet
I'm pre-launch. Zero users. Every sentence above is a decision I've made on paper and not yet had punched in the face by reality.
The thing I'm least sure about is whether the free tier is generous enough to spread on its own, or whether I'm being too precious about the generation costs. Ask me in six months.
I'm posting the whole build, including the parts that don't work, at bleam.ai. If you're building something similar and want to compare notes on the API approval gauntlet, my inbox is open.
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