A brand offered me $90 for an Instagram post. I thought it was an insult.

Pooya · 13 Aug 2026

A furniture accessories brand wrote to me in July offering $90 for a feed post. Every rate guide I could find put an account my size — 13,410 followers, 3.2% engagement — somewhere between $200 and $800.

I drafted a reply that I am glad I did not send. It used the word "seriously".

Then I looked at where my audience actually is, and the offer stopped looking like an insult and started looking like arithmetic.

The number nobody puts at the top of the rate guide

Published influencer rates assume a US audience. Almost none of them say so.

Brands do not pay for followers. They pay for the chance that a follower buys something, and that chance is priced by the advertising market the audience lives in.

The clearest evidence for that is not an influencer rate card at all — it is what advertisers pay per thousand impressions in each country, because every sponsored rate sits on top of that floor. In 2026 the United States runs around $23 per thousand impressions against India's $2.60, and a second benchmark set puts the United States at $16 to $21 against India at $1.00 to $1.80. Depending on whose data you read, the ratio is somewhere between eight and twenty to one.

Translated into what a creator is actually offered per thousand followers, the tiers look roughly like this:

The country index behind the estimator sets out the full spread, including the markets that rarely appear in published tables at all.

About 90% of my audience sits in one country, and it is not one of the expensive ones. Most published tables do not list it at all. What they do agree on is the shape: local brands pay in local currency at local advertising rates, and converting that into dollars lands at or below the bottom row of the table above.

Ninety dollars against a $200 to $800 guide is not a lowball. It is the guide priced for somebody else's audience.

What actually sets the rate, in order

Working through this properly rearranged my sense of what matters.

Where the audience lives, not where I live. This is the one I had backwards. A creator in a cheap advertising market whose followers are mostly in Los Angeles is a US page for pricing purposes. A creator in Los Angeles whose followers are all somewhere brands pay a fifth as much is not. It is the audience's purchasing power being bought, not the creator's postcode.

Engagement against the band for the size. This is the lever I can actually move, and it is why I read the rate before anything else now. An audience responding above the ordinary band for its size raises the price, because the brand is buying attention rather than a headcount.

Niche. Finance, software and B2B pay several times what lifestyle pays at the same follower count. Woodworking sits in an awkward middle — the audience is small and genuinely interested, which is worth something, and it is not buying enterprise software.

Usage rights. One post that stays up for thirty days is one price. The same post plus the right to run it as a paid advert for six months is a different one, often two to four times higher. This is where I had been leaving the most money, and it has nothing to do with what country anyone is in.

What I did instead of arguing

I stopped treating dollar rates and local rates as the same business.

For local brands I price in local currency, against what local brands actually pay, and I stopped mentally converting it into dollars to feel bad about it. The conversion was never telling me anything except the exchange rate.

For the foreign offer I asked two questions rather than negotiating the number. First, whether they wanted usage rights, because if they did then $90 was genuinely low and the conversation was about a different product. Second, what share of my audience they cared about — because roughly 8% of my followers are outside my own country, and for a brand that only ships to Europe that is the real inventory, which makes the honest comparison 1,100 reachable people rather than 13,410.

We settled at $140 with no usage rights. That is still below the American number in the guide and it is, I think, about right.

Using a range without being fooled by it

I run the per-post estimate on my own account now, and the thing I find useful about it is not the middle of the range but the width. A wide band is the honest way of saying that two accounts with identical public numbers can price ten times apart depending on things a public profile does not show. The floor of that band is roughly my market. The ceiling is somebody else's.

Two habits worth having if you are outside the expensive markets:

Say where your audience is, early. A foreign brand working from a US rate card is not trying to underpay you, and finding this out at the offer stage wastes everybody's evening. I now put audience country in the media kit, next to the follower count and its rounding band.

Do not let a low dollar figure convince you the account is weak. This is the one that had me drafting an angry email. A local page in a cheaper market is correctly cheap for a US campaign and correctly priced for a local one, and those are two different sentences about the same account. Cheap inventory and bad inventory look identical on a spreadsheet and are not the same thing at all.

The rate did not tell me my audience was worthless. It told me which market was buying.