Guide
Pricing & Negotiation
Creators
Price from what the collaboration involves, not from your follower count. Build a rate from production time, deliverables, usage rights and exclusivity, then adjust for the value you can prove you deliver. Creators who can show clicks and sales negotiate from evidence; creators who can only show follower numbers negotiate from hope.
Most creators start with a rule of thumb — some amount per thousand followers. It is easy, widely repeated, and consistently underprices good work.
It ignores production effort. A single photo and a three-day filmed sequence get the same price. It ignores usage rights entirely, so brands routinely obtain paid-ad licences for free. And it prices you against your audience size rather than the results you produce, which is exactly the comparison that favours larger, less effective creators.
Build the price from the work instead.
Estimate honestly, including everything: concept, setup, filming, retakes, editing, revisions, and the messages back and forth. Most creators undercount by half because they only count filming.
Decide what an hour of your professional time is worth. If you would not do a full day for the fee being offered, that is your answer.
Posting to your audience is separate from making the content. This is where audience size legitimately enters — you are selling access to people who trust you.
Price each deliverable distinctly. A Reel, three stories with a link, and a TikTok are three products, not one bundle to be given away together.
The most commonly under-charged item in the industry.
If a brand wants to run your content as a paid ad, that is a licence with real value — they are avoiding a production cost and getting an asset that may run for a year. Price it separately, scaled to duration and breadth of use.
Practical guidance: organic reposting on the brand's own channels is often reasonable to include. Paid amplification is not. Perpetual, all-channel rights should cost substantially more than the content fee itself.
If a brand asks you not to work with competitors, they are restricting your income. That is a real cost and should be priced as one, scaled to how long and how broadly the restriction applies.
Always clarify what counts as a competitor. "No other beauty brands" is a far larger concession than "no other retinol serums", and brands often write the broad version without meaning it.
Pure commission means you carry all the risk. It can pay very well with a product that converts and an audience that buys — and pay nothing at all otherwise.
Sensible defaults:
Before agreeing to any commission arrangement, confirm the tracking works, the attribution window is reasonable, and you can see your own numbers. Commission you cannot verify is not really a rate.
This is one practical advantage of working through a platform: in Make Influence, tracked clicks and sales are visible to you as well as the brand, so commission is measurable rather than reported to you after the fact.
Charge more when: your engagement is strong for your size, your niche is specialised, the brief demands unusual effort, the timeline is short, exclusivity is requested, paid-ad rights are included, or you have evidence you convert.
Charge less when: you genuinely want the product, the brand is small and you want the relationship, it is a long-term arrangement with guaranteed volume, or the creative freedom is high enough to be worth something to you.
Do not discount because you feel awkward asking. That is not a pricing signal.
The strongest position in any rate conversation is a number that is not your follower count.
"My last three collaborations averaged 280 clicks and 19 sales" reframes the negotiation entirely. You stop being an audience of a certain size and become a channel with a known cost per acquisition — which brands can justify internally far more easily.
Start collecting this from your next collaboration: clicks, sales, code redemptions, saves, story link taps. See how to build a media kit.
Let the brand name a budget first where possible. "What budget do you have for this?" is a completely normal question and often returns more than you would have asked for.
When you do quote, quote itemised. "3,500 for the Reel and stories, plus 1,500 for three months of paid-ad rights" is much harder to argue down than a single number, because each line is defensible.
If they say it is too expensive, do not cut the price — cut the scope. Remove a deliverable or narrow the usage rights. Reducing the number while keeping everything included teaches them your prices are negotiable.
And be willing to walk away. Brands that will only work at rates you cannot sustain are not really clients.
Raise when you are consistently booked, when your performance data has improved, when your audience has grown meaningfully, or when the work stops feeling worth the fee.
Apply new rates to new enquiries first rather than announcing an increase to existing clients. Give warning to regulars — a month's notice and a brief reason is enough. Some will decline; that is a normal outcome, and the ones who stay are usually the better clients anyway.
Generally no. Rates vary too much by scope, and publishing sets a ceiling you cannot exceed for demanding briefs.
Yes. Scope, rights, exclusivity and timeline vary, so prices should too.
Fine if it is genuinely light and you want the product. If they attach deliverables, deadlines and usage rights, it is commissioned work and should be paid.
If every brand accepts immediately without negotiating, you are almost certainly too cheap.
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