Influencer rate calculator

All four fields start empty, and they stay empty: nothing here is pre-filled. We have never measured what usage rights or exclusivity are worth, and a number dropped into a form as a default becomes the negotiating position of whoever dropped it there. The figures to type are the ones from your quote, your budget, or your conversation with the creator.

A brand asks for “your rate”, gets a single number, and the talks then fall apart because each side had a different job in mind. Almost every rate breaks into four lines, and three of them can be haggled over on their own.

The post itself

This is the making and the showing: working up an idea, filming, editing, publishing, then answering the comments underneath. It is the only line most people picture when a rate gets quoted, which is exactly why it ends up as the base the other three are measured against.

Usage rights

Running that video as an advert, on a product page, in a shop or inside a newsletter has nothing to do with publishing it: that is a licence, and a licence has a length, a territory and a list of places it may appear. This line surprises people more than any other, and it is the commonest source of a falling-out after the fact — because a brand that paid for a post assumes it bought the file.

Exclusivity

Promising to turn down a rival for a while means giving up income. The longer the window and the broader the category, the more that giving-up costs — and of the four lines, this is the one whose price hangs least on the creator and most on what a brand demands.

Volume

Several posts booked together cost less each: the brief gets written once, the framing gets settled once, and so does the relationship. A discount buys a firm commitment; it is not a rebate won by wearing somebody down.

The percentages you type are not handed down from anywhere: they get argued over, and an argument needs reasons. Here are the ones that keep coming up — with no figures from us, because the right amount hangs on your market, your country and the person across the table.

What pushes it up

• A long rights window, or worse, one with no end at all. “In perpetuity” means buying the whole future of that file in a single go.
• Paid media. Putting budget behind the content turns it into an advertising asset, and a creator fee does not grow along with the impressions.
• Broad exclusivity. Ruling out a whole category costs more than ruling out one named rival.
• A tight brief: a script to follow, approval rounds stacked up, a fixed location, a short deadline. Those are hours, and hours get billed.
• Licensing a creator's face away from their own channels — billboards, television, packaging. At that point it stops being a post and becomes a campaign.

What pulls it down

• A commitment to several posts, signed in a single go.
• Real creative freedom: fewer approvals, fewer rounds, fewer hours.
• Short rights, kept to the creator's own channels, with no advertising pick-up.
• A product the creator would use anyway, and wants to be seen using.
• A relationship that lasts: a second contract takes less work to set up than the first, on both sides.

• Whether the price is fair. The tool adds up what you typed; it holds no view on what an audience is worth, and we publish no rate card.
• What the work will earn back. A rate is a cost. Weighing it against a result is a different sum, with different figures in it.
• What the contract really allows. A length, a territory and a list of placements belong in writing; a percentage cannot stand in for them.
• What the taxman will want. The tool knows nothing of your country, your status or the creator's — an invoice from a creator may carry tax, and sometimes a withholding.
• Whether the creator will say yes. A clear breakdown replaces no negotiation: it makes one possible.

A breakdown settles half the problem: it tells both sides what they are talking about. The other half is knowing whether the number sitting beside “base fee” makes any sense for this particular creator — their real size, how their recent posts performed, how they stand beside creators who are genuinely comparable.

That is the job the product does, and it runs on data we gather rather than on percentages you type. A free account gives you the first three: the real size, how the recent posts performed, the standing among comparable creators. Estimating the fee itself — the number you would set beside “base fee” — needs a paid plan, and we would rather say so before you sign up than after. The sum above, you can rebuild in a spreadsheet. The others, you cannot.