What happened to the Buffer API? Best alternatives for developers in 2026

Buffer had the best API in social media

For years, Buffer’s API was the default choice for developers who needed to publish to social media programmatically. It was clean, well-documented, and widely integrated. If you wanted to add social publishing to an app, workflow, or internal tool, Buffer was the obvious answer.

Thousands of integrations depended on it. Automation platforms wired into it. SaaS products embedded it. Internal tools assumed it would always be there.

Then, in 2019, Buffer revoked third-party API access.

What actually happened

Buffer stopped accepting new developer API applications and began revoking access for existing integrations. Their stated reasons were twofold:

1. Social network compliance. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, and Pinterest tightened their API terms. Buffer said they could no longer permit certain third-party API usage “especially when the posting goes beyond the stated agreements we have with the social networks.”

2. Business refocus. Buffer audited existing API integrations and revoked access to tools that replicated Buffer’s core scheduling functionality. The API had become a way for competitors to build on top of Buffer’s infrastructure, and they decided to close that door.

The result was abrupt for developers who had built on Buffer’s API. Integrations broke. Workflows stopped. The best social media publishing API disappeared overnight.

Where Buffer stands today

Buffer has been rebuilding its API for years now. As of early 2026, it exists in a limited beta. You can request access, generate a personal API key, and use it with automation tools. But the experience is not what it used to be.

The beta is personal-key-only. Third-party app integrations — the use case that made Buffer’s original API valuable — remain restricted. If you are building a product that needs to publish on behalf of your users, Buffer’s current API is not designed for that.

For individual automation (connecting your own Buffer account to Zapier or n8n), it works. For anything beyond that, developers need to look elsewhere.

What developers actually need from a publishing API

The gap Buffer left is not just “an API endpoint that accepts a post.” Developers who relied on Buffer’s API were solving real problems:

• Multi-platform publishing — Send one request, publish to multiple social networks
• Programmatic scheduling — Integrate publishing into automated workflows, not a manual calendar
• Reliable delivery — Know what succeeded, what failed, and why
• Clean authentication — API keys or OAuth, not dashboard logins
• Media handling — Upload images and videos without dealing with each platform’s upload protocol

These requirements have not changed. If anything, they have grown more urgent as AI agents, automation platforms, and headless architectures have made programmatic publishing the default rather than the exception.

The alternatives

Several services have emerged to fill the gap Buffer left. Here is how the landscape looks for developers in 2026.

Ayrshare

Ayrshare positioned itself early as a Buffer API replacement and has built a solid developer-facing product. It supports most major platforms, offers REST endpoints for publishing, and has clear documentation.

The pricing model is per-profile, which can add up quickly for multi-brand or agency use cases. Rate limits are reasonable for most workflows.

Late (getlate.dev)

Late focuses on scheduling and publishing with an API-first approach. It supports major platforms and offers Zapier and Make integrations.

Its content tends toward listicle-style comparisons, but the underlying product is functional for basic publishing workflows.

Postproxy

Postproxy approaches the problem differently. Rather than being a social media management tool with an API bolted on, it was built from the start as publishing infrastructure.

A single API call publishes to every connected platform:

curl -X POST "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/posts" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{
       "post": {
         "body": "Announcing our latest feature. Here is what changed."
       },
       "profiles": ["twitter", "linkedin", "instagram"],
       "media": ["https://example.com/image.png"]
     }'

What makes it different from the other alternatives:

• Explicit partial success handling. Publishing to five platforms rarely means all five succeed at once. Postproxy reports per-platform, per-account outcomes instead of collapsing everything into a single pass/fail. For automated workflows, this distinction is critical.
• MCP server. Postproxy has a Model Context Protocol server that lets AI agents publish directly. If you are building agent-driven workflows with Claude, GPT, or custom LLMs, this is a unique capability.
• n8n integration. Native support for n8n workflows, which matters if your automation stack is open-source.
• Media handling. One media array in the request. Postproxy handles the platform-specific upload protocols — chunked uploads for LinkedIn video, container-based uploads for Instagram, direct uploads for X — so you do not have to.

Direct platform APIs

You can always build each integration yourself. Each platform has its own API: the Instagram Graph API, LinkedIn’s Posts API, X’s v2 API, TikTok’s Content Posting API.

The problem is that each one requires separate authentication, separate app review processes, separate media upload flows, and separate failure handling. We wrote about this — it looks simple until you are managing eight integrations, each with its own quirks and failure modes. This is the problem that unified publishing APIs exist to solve.

Migrating from Buffer

If you still have code that references Buffer’s API, migration is straightforward. The core concept — send content and platform targets, get publishing results — is the same across modern alternatives.

A typical Buffer API call looked something like this:

curl -X POST "https://api.bufferapp.com/1/updates/create.json" \
     -d "text=Hello world" \
     -d "profile_ids[]=abc123" \
     -d "access_token=YOUR_TOKEN"

The equivalent in Postproxy:

curl -X POST "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/posts" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{
       "post": {
         "body": "Hello world"
       },
       "profiles": ["twitter", "linkedin"]
     }'

The migration path is less about translating one API call to another and more about choosing infrastructure that will not disappear. Buffer’s shutdown is a reminder that building on a tool’s API is different from building on publishing infrastructure. Tools can change direction. Infrastructure is the direction.

The real lesson from Buffer’s API shutdown

Buffer did not fail. It made a business decision. Its API was enabling competitors, and closing it made strategic sense for the company.

But for developers, the lesson is clear: if your publishing workflow depends on a social media management tool that happens to offer an API, you are one business decision away from losing that dependency.

The alternative is to treat publishing as infrastructure from the start. Use a service whose entire purpose is being the API layer between your systems and social platforms. That alignment — where the API is the product, not a feature — is what makes the dependency stable.

Buffer’s API was great while it lasted. The next choice should be one that lasts because the incentives are aligned, not because the market conditions happen to be favorable.