How to Price Brand Deals: A Creator's Guide to Setting Your Rate

Most creators set their first brand deal rate by guessing, then spend the next year wondering if they left money on the table. They usually did. Pricing a partnership isn't about picking a number that feels bold enough to say out loud; it's about understanding what you're actually selling and charging for every part of it.

Why most creators underprice their first brand deal

The instinct when a brand slides into your inbox is relief, followed by a rushed number pulled from a group chat or a rough "£X per 1,000 followers" rule of thumb. That formula ignores almost everything that makes a partnership valuable: your engagement rate, your niche, the usage rights the brand wants, and how much production work sits behind a single post.

A rate built on followers alone treats a 40,000-follower niche audience the same as a 40,000-follower general lifestyle account, when the brand's return on those two audiences can be wildly different.

What you're actually pricing

A brand deal fee is rarely just "one Instagram post." Break it into its real components before you quote anything:

• Creative production: filming, editing, revisions, and the time spent getting the brief right.
• Distribution: the reach and engagement your specific audience delivers, not a generic follower count.
• Usage rights: whether the brand can reuse your content in ads, on their own channels, or in paid media. This alone can double a fair fee.
• Exclusivity: if the brand wants you to avoid competitors for a period, that's a separate line item, not a freebie.
• Whitelisting or paid amplification: running ads through your handle is a different, higher-value ask than an organic post.

Quote each of these separately, even if you bundle them into one final number. It shows the brand exactly what they're paying for, and it stops "just one more post" from creeping into the deal for free.

Demand varies a lot by niche, and that should shape your confidence

Where you sit matters. On Get Blogged right now, Lifestyle & Everyday Living is the busiest category with 465 active creators, followed by Travel & Tourism at 138 and Food & Recipes at 83. Fitness & Training (86), Beauty & Skincare (82), Fashion & Style (79), Home & Interiors (74), Parenting & Family (71) and Business (66) round out the most active spaces for brand collaborations.

A crowded niche means more brands actively browsing that category, but it also means more creators to compare against. A smaller, more specific niche often gives you more pricing power, because a brand that needs that exact audience has fewer places to go.

A simple framework for setting your number

Rather than chasing a single "market rate" that changes depending on who you ask, build your fee from the ground up:

• Start with a base fee for the core deliverable, reflecting your typical engagement and the time the content takes to produce.
• Add a line for each extra deliverable, such as a Story sequence, a Reel, a static post, a blog feature.
• Price usage rights and whitelisting separately, scaled to how long and how widely the brand wants to use the content.
• Add a premium for exclusivity periods, since you're turning away other income for that window.
• Round to a number you could defend line by line if a brand asked you to justify it.

This approach also makes negotiation far easier. When a brand's budget is tight, you're not lowering your worth, you're removing a line item, such as usage rights or an extra deliverable, until the scope matches the fee.

What to say when the budget doesn't match your rate

Don't take the first number personally, and don't drop your fee to match it either. A short, direct response protects the relationship and the rate: "My fee for this scope is [X]. If the budget is fixed at [Y], I can adjust the deliverables to fit, for example dropping the Story sequence or shortening the usage window." This keeps the conversation about scope, not about whether you're worth the number.

Put your rate in front of brands who already expect to pay it

The fastest way to stop negotiating from a weak position is to work with brands who come in already briefed on paid collaboration, rather than ones testing whether you'll work for free product. Join Get Blogged as a creator to get discovered by brands running paid campaigns in your niche, and start every negotiation from a fee you set, not one a brand suggests.