The £30/Month Stack That Runs Two Brands

There's a trap a lot of people fall into when they decide to take content seriously. They see what big companies spend on marketing technology and reverse-engineer the logic: ambitious goal, expensive tools. So they start pricing up the enterprise stack — $300/month here, $200/month there — and either spend it, or talk themselves out of the whole thing.

Zo.E costs me under £30 a month. Running two brands. Tens of thousands of workflow executions. And the quality is good enough that people ask what agency I use.

Here's the actual breakdown.

n8n on PikaPods: ~£5/month. This is the engine. All 10 workflows, both brands, as many executions as I need — flat fee. n8n is open-source automation software, and PikaPods hosts it for you without requiring you to manage servers. For a fiver a month, I've got the same orchestration capability that would cost hundreds in a Zapier subscription. If you're reading this as a Zo.E purchaser, this is where your workflows live.

NocoDB: free. NocoDB is the database layer — it holds every post, every scheduled date, every performance metric. On the free tier it handles everything Zo.E throws at it without complaint. No cost here at all.

Google Gemini: effectively free. The AI that writes, rewrites, and critiques content throughout the pipeline. The free tier handles the volume for most runs. When I push harder, the API token cost is negligible — we're talking pennies, not pounds.

Bluesky, Cloudinary, Telegram: all free. Distribution, image hosting, notifications. Zero.

Upload Post: ~$20/month. This is the one exception, and it's worth explaining why.

Multi-platform social scheduling sounds simple until you're staring at LinkedIn's OAuth requirements, Bluesky's API quirks, and three other platforms all wanting different authentication flows. Building that from scratch is weeks of work and ongoing maintenance. Upload Post handles all of it — the scheduling, the API connections, the multi-platform publishing that WF5, WF8, and WF10 depend on. Twenty dollars a month to not build and maintain that myself is not a cost. It's the right call.

That's it. £30/month total, roughly.

The reason it's cheap is structural. Every tool in this stack is either open-source, free-tier SaaS, or pay-per-use API. You're not buying dashboards. You're not paying for a sales team, a brand refresh, or a per-seat licence. You're buying capability at wholesale rates — the actual compute, the actual API tokens, the actual hosting — with none of the retail markup that comes with polished B2B software.

The enterprise trap is paying retail for capability you could buy wholesale. Zo.E is wholesale, end to end, with one pragmatic exception where the build cost makes the subscription a bargain.

Ta,

James
Founder | Nunlimited