The math most agency owners haven't done
Take out your credit card statement and find your Hootsuite charge. Now ask yourself: when did you last sit down and actually calculate what that's costing you as a percentage of your revenue?
For a freelance SMM charging $1,200/month per client with 5 clients, Hootsuite at $249/month is over 4% of gross revenue going to a single tool. That's before you factor in contractor time, ad spend management tools, design tools, and everything else.
I'm not saying Hootsuite isn't good. It's a solid product. But for most Australian agencies, it's significantly over-built and over-priced.
Why agencies end up on Hootsuite
Usually it's one of these reasons:
Inertia. They started on Hootsuite when it was more competitively priced, and switching tools has never become a priority among the daily chaos of running an agency.
Perceived safety. Hootsuite is the "safe" choice. If something goes wrong, no one will question why you chose it. Using a newer, cheaper tool requires more confidence.
Legacy features. Some agencies have built processes around specific Hootsuite features and genuinely believe they'd lose productivity switching.
What you're actually paying for
Hootsuite's professional plan at $99/month gives you:
That's not a bad set of features. But compare it to Zestly Pro at $99/month:
The feature-per-dollar comparison is stark.
The real cost of switching
Most agency owners who've considered switching have talked themselves out of it with the "switching cost" argument. Let's actually count it.
Time to migrate clients to a new tool: 4-6 hours total
Time to train team on new tool: 2-4 hours
Downtime risk: effectively zero with proper planning
That's roughly a day of work. At a typical agency billing rate, that's maybe $800-1200 of time investment.
If switching saves you $100/month, you break even in 8-12 months. If it saves you $200/month, you break even in 4-6 months.
It's worth doing the calculation.
How to switch without disruption
If you decide to make the move:
1. Sign up for a Zestly trial and run it in parallel for 2 weeks
2. Migrate one client account as a test
3. When you're confident, migrate remaining clients
4. Set your Hootsuite cancellation date for end of the current billing period
Don't cancel Hootsuite before you're fully migrated. Overlap is worth the cost of a couple of weeks of parallel subscriptions.
When to stay on Hootsuite
If any of these apply, Hootsuite might still be the right call:
If none of those apply, you're probably just paying for a brand name.
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