How brand deals actually get priced

A brand emails asking for your rate. You have about a day to answer, no idea what they set aside, and two ways to get it wrong. Name a number so low they agree in four minutes, or so high they never write again. From your side the two feel identical, because either way you never learn what the right number was.

What helps is knowing that somebody on the other side of that email is running a sum. It is not hidden and it is not clever. A planner has a budget, a number of people they want to reach, and a way of turning one into the other. Your fee comes out of that. Once you can run the same sum, the conversation stops being a guess about what you are worth and becomes a conversation about inputs.

A brand is buying a thousand pairs of eyes at a price

Nobody at the brand is buying a reel. They are buying attention, sold by the thousand, and the unit has a name older than Instagram: CPM, cost per mille, the cost of reaching a thousand people once. Newspapers sold space that way. Television sold time that way. Meta sells its own ad inventory that way today, which means the person pricing your post already thinks in it, because it is the only number that lets them compare you to a billboard, a podcast and a TV spot on one page.

So the base of nearly every offer you will ever receive is one line of arithmetic. Take the views the post is expected to get, divide by a thousand, multiply by the CPM the brand is willing to pay. A creator whose reels usually reach forty thousand views, priced at 300 rupees per thousand, is a 12,000 rupee base. Move either input and the number moves with it. Your fee is two numbers multiplied together, and nothing in that sum is a judgement of your worth.

Whatever that produced is a starting position and nothing more. It prices the views and only the views. Everything a brand wants beyond one post appearing on your account, the right to run it as an advert, a promise you will not work with a competitor, the raw footage, a four day turnaround, sits outside that sum entirely. Each of those is a separate ask and a separate line you are entitled to price.

Followers are the wrong number to quote on

The follower count is the number every brand asks for first and the number that predicts the least. It is a running total of everybody who ever tapped a button, including the ones who tapped it in 2021 for a post you would not make now. It cannot go down when interest does, which is the whole problem with it as a pricing input.

Instagram itself has stopped organising around the older proxies. Meta told developers on 8 January 2025 that Views would replace Impressions and Plays across the platform, and the change landed in the API on 21 April 2025. Whatever you think of the metric, the platform has told everybody which number it considers primary, and a brand comparing you to an ad buy has been given a directly comparable unit.

That third figure is the honest state of published rate advice. A thousandfold spread is a shrug rather than a benchmark. It is also why two creators with identical follower counts are worth different money to the same brand, with nobody being unfair.

Take Maya, the lifestyle account this site uses for worked examples: 18,412 followers in Mumbai, engagement rate 4.7 percent across 143 analysed posts. A creator with sixty thousand followers and an engagement rate under one percent has three times her audience on paper and may put fewer people in front of the product. If you quote on followers, you are quoting on the one number that hides that difference.

So know two numbers before you answer any email: your median views per reel over the last ten, and the same for carousels. Median rather than average, because one runaway post drags an average somewhere you cannot repeat, and quoting a rate you cannot deliver twice is how a good client becomes a difficult one.

The base is the smallest part of most offers

Once the views are priced, everything else in the brief is a separate ask. Most creators price the post and hand over four other things for nothing, because those four arrive in the same paragraph as the deliverables and look like admin.

So quote the base and the extras as separate lines in the same email. It makes the total explicable and gives the brand somewhere to cut that is not your fee. A brand that cannot afford the twelve month usage term can often afford the three month one, and they only find that out if you showed them the line.

Whether to publish a rate card

The advice you will read most often is to build a rate card and send it on request. It is tidy and it is mostly a mistake, for one structural reason: a published rate is a ceiling and never a floor. Brands with a bigger budget pay the number on the card. Brands with a smaller budget ask for a discount from the number on the card. Nothing about the card ever moves a price up.

It also prices the wrong thing. A card says one reel: this much, which quietly agrees that a reel is a reel whether the brand wants twelve months of paid usage on it or none. You end up negotiating discounts on a number that ignored the expensive half of the brief.

One public number does earn its place. If you get more enquiries than you can answer, a stated minimum (I take brand work from this figure upwards) filters the ones that were never going to work without capping the ones that were. That is a floor, which is the opposite device.

Answering the rate question without naming a number first

The email says: what are your rates? A rate for what is still missing, so the question has not been asked properly yet. Everyone experienced on the brand side expects a couple of questions back, and sending them is the first thing a professional does.

1. 01Ask what the deliverables are, exactly. One reel, three stories and a carousel is a different job from one reel. Get the count, the formats and whether the stories need link stickers. Half of all underpricing happens here, before money is mentioned at all.
2. 02Ask about usage, exclusivity and timeline in the same message. How long do they want to use the content, on which channels, are they running it as paid, and does anything stop you working with similar brands afterwards. Three sentences. They will either answer or reveal that nobody has decided, and both are useful.
3. 03Ask what they have budgeted for this partnership. It gets answered more often than creators expect, because the person emailing you usually has a figure in a spreadsheet. If they will not say, name what your work at this scope usually runs to and let them respond to a range.
4. 04Then price it in writing, itemised. Base fee for the deliverables, a line for usage with its term, a line for exclusivity with its window, a line for anything rushed. Add the payment terms and the date you expect to be paid by. An itemised quote is harder to haggle down than one number, because each line has a reason attached to it.

Naming a number first is not a disaster, though. The four questions buy information, and information is worth real money on a big deal. On a small one, a two-day delay can cost you the job. Match the ceremony to the size.

Perpetual usage costs more than the fee

Here is the clause that quietly takes the most money out of creator work, and it is usually four words in a contract nobody reads twice: in perpetuity, worldwide, all media.

Perpetuity means forever. Not a long time, not until the campaign ends. Forever. The brand can run your face in a paid ad in 2031 on the strength of a fee they paid in 2026, in any country, on any surface, including ones that do not exist yet. You cannot take it back, and there is no renewal to charge for, because the term never ends.

The second cost is the one people miss. A creator who granted perpetual rights to a skincare brand three years ago may find that brand still running their face today, which reads to every rival skincare brand as a live endorsement of a competitor. You gave away one fee and one category, indefinitely, and the category is worth more.

Two other terms belong in the same category. Perpetual exclusivity, which is rarer and worse, and a clause saying you are paid when the brand pays the agency, which moves somebody else's cash-flow risk onto you for free.

One more, and this one is not negotiable in either direction: the post has to be disclosed. India's Advertising Standards Council requires a clear label on any promotional content, whether money changed hands or not, under guidelines in force since June 2021. The US Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides, last revised in 2023, take the same view of material connections, and a free product counts as one. Put the label where it cannot be missed and price the work honestly. Those two things are the same instinct.

Where the deal lives after you agree the price

Everything above works with a notebook. What a notebook is bad at is the six weeks after the price is agreed, when the terms are in one email, the deadline is in a calendar, the deliverables are in a brief you have not reopened, and the invoice is a template you will make on the day. This is the part of our product that is about brand deals, and it is one section of an article that works without it.

In Synclify a deal is a record beside the calendar rather than a thread in your inbox. The brief goes in and comes back with the blanks named: how long they can use the video, whether you can work with similar brands, when they actually pay. Deliverables become dated items on the same calendar as your own posts, so a brand deadline and your Thursday reel cannot quietly land on the same afternoon. The invoice is generated from the deal rather than typed again.

proof: a brief is read for the terms it does not state, and usage, exclusivity and payment date are three of them (docs/PRODUCT.md, the brand deals section)

Then there is chasing, which is where money is genuinely lost. A background job runs every morning at eight, looks for invoices that are properly late rather than merely due, and drafts the reminder. It does not send it. Anything leaving the building on your behalf waits for a tap.

proof: the invoice job runs daily at 08:00 and chases only what is properly late; the send waits for a tap and the pending confirmation expires after 24 hours (the scheduled jobs file, server/ai/agent-gate.ts, server/agent/agent-storage.ts)

Questions people ask about pricing a deal