Instagram money calculator

How to price a sponsored Instagram post

Work out your engagement rate before you touch the calculator, because it moves the answer as much as your follower count does. Average the likes and comments on your last ten unsponsored posts, divide by followers, and keep that percentage to hand.

1. 1Take the follower count of the account you would actually post from, not a combined total across platforms.
2. 2Enter it as Followers and let the tool place you in a size band.
3. 3Pick the engagement tier that matches the percentage you worked out, and watch what it does to the range.
4. 4Read the result as a base fee for one in-feed post with nothing else attached.
5. 5Open the conversation at the high end. The brand has a budget you cannot see, and the first number said out loud sets the ceiling for everything after it.
6. 6Write the scope down alongside the fee, so the thing you priced and the thing you deliver stay the same thing.

What the range covers, and what sits outside it

The figure prices one deliverable off the two things a brand can check before it ever speaks to you: how many people follow the account, and how many of them react to it.

• The rate per 1,000 followers falls as the account grows, from USD 25 in the nano band to USD 10 in the macro band. The totals still rise, because the follower count rises faster than the rate falls.
• Worked example: 25,000 followers at average engagement sits in the micro band and gives USD 250 to USD 625, with USD 375 in the middle.
• The engagement multiplier spans 0.8 to 1.6. On that same account it is the difference between USD 300 and USD 600 for an identical post.
• This is a fee per post, not monthly income. Four deals in a year is four of these, and creators who confuse the two badly overestimate what the account earns.
• Production is not in it: a shoot day, a location, a second pair of hands, and the hours you spend editing are all your cost unless you price them in.
• If a manager or an agency represents you, their commission comes off the top of whatever you agree, so the fee you quote is not the fee you keep.

Where creators misprice themselves

The expensive mistake is not losing one negotiation. It is turning a benchmark into a published rate, quoting it early, and then being held to it for a year.

• Giving a number before the brief. Without deliverables, usage and exclusivity you are pricing something whose shape you have not been told.
• Accepting gifted product as payment. It has a wholesale cost to the brand and a retail price to you, and neither of those is your fee.
• Buying followers. It moves you up a size band and down an engagement tier at once, and because the multiplier bites harder, the estimate goes down.
• Pricing off a peak post. Reach on Reels is volatile, so the engagement rate worth quoting is the median across recent posts rather than your best one.
• Quoting a currency you did not agree. These bands are USD; invoice in pounds against a dollar quote and you carry both the conversion and the fees.

When follower count is the wrong basis

Follower count is a proxy for the thing a brand is buying, and the proxy breaks at both ends of the range.

• A 3,000-follower account whose audience is entirely buyers in one narrow niche can be worth several times the nano band, because the brand is buying qualified attention rather than reach.
• A 200,000-follower account built on reposted memes can be close to unsellable, because nothing about that audience tells an advertiser anything about its customer.
• If you have conversion data, a discount code, affiliate sales, a landing page, price on outcomes instead. That argument moves a budget in a way a follower heuristic never will.
• For an ambassador deal or a retainer, none of this applies. Those are priced on the length of the term and the exclusivity you are giving up, not on a per-post rate.