What should youcharge?

How the number is worked out

Most rate advice starts and stops at follower count. It is the one number that is easy to look up and the one that tells a brand least. A 20,000 account that nobody watches is worth less than a 6,000 account whose videos land, and any model that cannot say so will produce the wrong answer for somebody.

So the count is only the starting point here, not the answer.

1. Your audience, and how it actually performs

The base figure starts from audience size on the long-standing ten dollars per thousand followers convention. That convention matters more than it looks: a number a media buyer already recognises gets approved, and an invented one gets questioned.

Then it moves. Your engagement rate is compared against what is normal for an account your size, and the base is adjusted up or down accordingly. Strong engagement on a small account can carry it a long way past a bigger, quieter one.

That adjustment is capped in both directions. Deliberately. An uncapped model would double your whole rate card after one good week and you would lose a deal you had already agreed verbally. The cap is what makes the number defensible rather than merely reactive.

2. What the brand is actually asking for

A story set is not a reel and a reel is not a three-post campaign. Each deliverable carries its own multiplier, and the category the brand trades in carries another. A tourism board and a local retailer are not buying the same thing even when the post looks identical.

3. Usage rights, which is where the money is

This is the part creators give away most often and it is usually the largest single line in a deal.

A post that sits on your feed is one thing. A brand running that same video as a paid advertisement for three months, on their channels, to an audience you will never see, is a materially bigger purchase. Whitelisting, exclusivity, extended terms and raw files all price separately here, because they are separate things.

If you take one idea away from this page, take that one. Agreeing a fee before agreeing the usage is how a single post quietly becomes a months-long advertising campaign that you were paid for once.

4. It shows its working

The calculator prints the multiplication underneath the rate, so you can see exactly which decision moved the number. That is there so you can defend the figure in an email, which is the only place it really has to hold up.

Every sponsored result also shows what the industry typically pays for one reel at your audience size, from published surveys. The formula runs low for very small accounts, and the range beside it shows where the market sits. The calculated number is left as it is, so it always matches the working printed under it.

Where these numbers come from

This is the same pricing engine behind The Live Rate Card in our media kits and behind both free rate cards. It is not a different, simpler model built for a free page. When the engine changes, this page changes with it.

One thing this page cannot do that the full version can: the engine also weighs your actual reach, how far your content travels beyond the people already following you. That is the figure that separates a growing account from a plateaued one, and it is worth real money to a brand. It needs live data from your accounts, so a public calculator has to leave it out and this one assumes you are performing normally for your size.

The model was tuned around the creators this studio works with, which means it is most reliable in the ranges those creators occupy. Well above that, audience fit and category start to matter more than size does, and a number taken from a part of the curve nobody has tested against a real deal is not worth publishing. At that point, quote individually.

Related reading

• What to charge a brand, with typical industry rates by audience size.
• What to put in a creator media kit, and what to leave out.
• A live media kit versus a PDF, and why the difference matters when a brand asks.