One number, no black box.
Every rate on ratepop is built from four things you can see: your numbers, a public formula, published 2026 market reports, and real deals reported here. This page shows exactly how, with the values in use right now.
Your numbers
Followers (or subscribers) and engagement: average likes + comments per post on Instagram and LinkedIn, average views on TikTok and YouTube. Type them, or paste your @handle and we read them from the platform's public API (Instagram Business/Creator accounts and YouTube). Numbers that match the API within 10% get the ✓ numbers verified badge.
A public formula
Each platform has two coefficients: one for audience, one for engagement or views. Then a niche multiplier, because a finance audience is worth more to a brand than a meme audience — and it is adjusted per platform: finance and tech pay more on YouTube (sponsorship CPMs $25–60 vs $15–25 for lifestyle), comedy is TikTok-native, consumer niches barely exist on LinkedIn.
Two guardrails: engagement is capped at 25% (fake-engagement pods don't pay), and it scales with account size — reduced below 10,000 followers (a 1k account with 15% engagement can't price like a 50k account) and growing with the square root of the audience above it, so strong engagement still pays on a 500k account. A third one for the very top: above 50M followers the audience term grows sub-linearly (×(followers ÷ 50M)^0.6) — sponsorship prices stop scaling with raw reach at that size, so a 500M channel lands at a few million per dedicated video, not twelve. On LinkedIn the audience-quality factors (who follows you, where, what you post about) are deliberately gentle — they multiply, so the strongest combination (Investors × North America × SaaS) tops out around ×2.57.
Where your audience lives matters too (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube): the 2026 benchmarks are US-heavy, so other markets scale down. The calculator suggests one from your time zone; you can change it any time.
Market fit
A formula alone drifts from reality. So we compare it, tier by tier, with what the market actually pays and multiply by a market-fit factor. Below 1 means the raw formula was above the market. It is recomputed by the automatic monthly check from the benchmarks in step 04 and the deals in step 05, and each automatic run can move it by at most 30%.
Benchmarks from public 2026 reports
The market range under every rate (min · median · max for your platform and follower tier) starts from published reports. They disagree by up to 5× — marketplace transaction data runs low, agency rate cards run high — so we take the middle of the credible range and show all of them:
- Collabstr — Instagram influencer marketing: what it costs in 2026 (21,000+ collaborations)
- Collabstr — 2026 Influencer Marketing Report (posted vs. paid by platform, niche averages)
- Collabstr — 2025 Influencer Marketing Report (262k packages; IG $212, TikTok $200, YouTube $418 actual spend)
- Influencer Marketing Hub — Nano influencer rates 2026
- Influencer Marketing Hub — Micro influencer rates 2026
- Influencer Marketing Hub — Macro influencer rates 2026
- Hypefy — Cost of influencer marketing 2026: rates by tier & platform
- ContentGrip — Influencer marketing rate card 2026 (IMH, Shopify, Collabstr, Click Analytic, Favikon)
- ContentGrip — LinkedIn influencer rates 2026 (Favikon, InfluenceFlow)
A monthly job re-reads these reports and updates the table; moves above 30% wait for a human.
Real deals, reported here
Creators report what brands actually paid (anonymous — shown on a profile only if the creator opts in for a screenshot-verified deal, brand hidden), and brands' offers arrive through “Book”. As they come in, they blend into the range with weight n / (n + 10). Once a tier has 10 data points (reported deals and brand offers), the range switches entirely to ratepop data — and rates in that tier become an exact figure instead of a band.
That is also why a rate shows as a range like $520–$700 for now: a single dollar figure would be false precision until enough real deals exist.
What the medians on the homepage are
The black band shows, per platform, the median asking rate of creators live on The Lineup today (when at least 10 are live). With fewer, it shows the benchmark median for the 10k–100k tier. It is a snapshot of today's asks, not of closed deals.
Who is “hottest today”
The featured card on the homepage wall is a paid Global Top spot when someone has booked one (that is what the $49 spot buys). Otherwise it is the real creator with the most upvotes; with a tie, the newer one wins. Upvotes are one per account (or per browser when logged out), demo profiles never win, and votes can't be bought.