Pay-Per-Use Social Media Pricing That Respects Your Budget

You sign up for a social media management tool. The pricing page says "$10 per month." Sold. You connect your accounts, add your team, start scheduling — and then the invoice arrives. Per-channel fee. Per-user fee. Analytics upgrade. Inbox add-on. Suddenly the $10 tool is $87 and you haven't even sent a WhatsApp message yet.

This pricing experience is so common that it has its own name in the industry: price shock at renewal. And it is the number one reason businesses switch social media tools within the first year.

There is a fundamentally different way to price a social media platform — one that charges you for what you use, not for what you might use. At LigiComms, we call it the credit wallet.

How Per-Channel Pricing Works (And Why It Hurts)

Most social media management tools use one of two pricing models:

• Per-channel pricing. You pay for each connected social account. Five Instagram accounts? Five charges. Add a YouTube channel? Another charge. The cost scales with your social footprint, not your usage.
• Per-user pricing. You pay for each team member who accesses the platform. Three editors, two managers, one admin? Six seats. Each seat comes with a monthly fee, whether that person posts daily or logs in once a month.

Both models share the same flaw: they punish growth. The more channels you connect, the more team members you onboard, the more expensive the tool gets — regardless of how much you actually publish. A business with ten channels that posts twice a week pays the same as one that posts ten times a day.

The Credit Wallet: Pay for What You Send

LigiComms separates the platform subscription from the usage cost.

Your subscription — Basic at ₹599, Pro at ₹1,499, or Premium at ₹1,999 a month billed annually — gives you the platform: the channels and team seats your plan allows (2, 4 or 7 seats), the CRM, the inbox, the calendar, the approval workflow, the AI assistant, the link shortener — everything.

Sending messages that cost money — WhatsApp broadcasts, SMS, X/Twitter posts — is paid from a credit wallet that you top up when you need it. The wallet is in Indian rupees. You add credit, you use it, the remainder stays. No expiry. No minimum monthly spend.

What Is Free and What Costs Credit

Here is the part that surprises people: most social publishing is free.

Publishing to Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Telegram, Bluesky and Tumblr costs zero credit. These platforms have free APIs. LigiComms does not charge you for using a free API.

The channels that cost credit are the ones where the upstream provider charges for API usage:

• X / Twitter — ₹1.45 per post (synced daily to the live USD-INR exchange rate, zero markup).
• WhatsApp — ₹0.86 per marketing message, ₹0.12 per utility or authentication message (Meta's own rate card, zero markup).
• SMS — ₹0.25 per message via the India DLT provider (zero markup).

Reading X/Twitter comments and insights also costs credit (₹0.48 per read, once per post per day). Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Pinterest and LinkedIn reads are free. The rate card is transparent, always visible on the dashboard, and provider costs are synced daily so you are never overcharged because of a stale exchange rate.

How the Wallet Prevents Nasty Surprises

Several design choices in the credit wallet exist specifically to prevent the billing surprises that plague other tools:

• Fail-closed on missing prices. If a send action has no configured price, it is blocked — not sent for free. This protects both you and the platform from unpriced usage.
• Atomic debit. The wallet charge happens before the send. If the send fails, the credit is refunded automatically. You never pay for a message that didn't deliver.
• Currency-matched. The wallet refuses a charge if the pricing rate is in a different currency than the wallet. No silent cross-currency math errors.
• Idempotent. A retry on a failed send uses a unique attempt key. You cannot be double-charged for the same publish attempt.
• Visible balance. The wallet balance is shown on the dashboard and refreshes every 20 seconds. You always know where you stand.

Recharging Is Simple and Transparent

Top up your wallet from the dashboard. Enter the amount you want to add (minimum ₹100, maximum ₹1,00,000). The system calculates any applicable tax (zero while GST is not yet registered — there is no phantom tax line on your invoice) and the payment gateway fee, shows you the total, and takes you to the checkout. The credit appears the moment the payment clears — reconciled by webhook or by a background job that picks up any order the webhook missed.

Your recharge history, every debit, every refund, and the full ledger is visible on the wallet page. Every rupee is accounted for. No hidden fees, no unexplained deductions.

Subscription Pricing That Actually Makes Sense

The subscription tiers are simple:

• Trial — 14 days, free, 2 team seats. Automatic on registration. Every feature unlocked so you can evaluate honestly.
• Basic — ₹599/month billed annually (₹7,188/year), or ₹699 month to month. 2 team seats. Everything except the approval workflow.
• Pro — ₹1,499/month billed annually (₹17,988/year), or ₹1,999 month to month. 4 seats. Adds approval workflow, bulk scheduling, evergreen recycling.
• Premium — ₹1,999/month billed annually (₹23,988/year), or ₹2,499 month to month. 7 seats. The full platform.

Quarterly billing is also available at the monthly rate — no discount game, no "billed annually" surprise. Upgrades take effect immediately. Remaining days on a lower plan are not prorated — you start the new plan from today, which is clearly stated before you confirm.

Discount coupons exist for specific plans and are deducted before tax, frozen at the time of order. A coupon cannot reduce the charge to zero — there is always a minimum payable amount — which keeps the normal payment flow intact without special free-order logic.

What This Means for Your Bottom Line

Do the math. A typical small business publishes across five social networks (free), sends 500 WhatsApp messages a month (₹430), and runs an occasional SMS campaign (₹125). Their monthly usage cost is around ₹555 in wallet credit, plus the ₹599 Basic subscription. Total: ₹1,154 per month for a tool that covers social publishing, WhatsApp Business API, SMS, email, CRM, unified inbox, AI content generation, and a content calendar.

Compare that to a stack of separate tools each billing monthly, each requiring its own login, and each blind to what the others are doing. The cost difference is not marginal. It is a different order of magnitude.

Your budget should pay for results, not for access. Credit-based pricing makes that possible.