What a micro-influencer agency actually does
Most of the job is administration: rates, contracts, briefs, approvals and chasing. You can do all of it yourself. This page is an honest account of what it involves, so you can decide whether paying somebody is worth it.
- The work is roughly twenty to forty hours per campaign, and most of it is contracting and chasing rather than choosing names.
- Software finds you accounts. It does not negotiate, contract, brief, approve or replace anybody. Those are different purchases.
- Our pricing: a shortlist is free, running a campaign is twenty per cent of creator spend with a four hundred dollar minimum, and ongoing work starts at nine hundred dollars a month with no minimum term.
- We never hold your money. You pay creators directly at the rate they set, and there is no escrow account sitting between you.
- There are four common situations where hiring us is the wrong call, and they are listed near the bottom rather than buried.
A micro-influencer agency finds creators in roughly the ten thousand to one hundred thousand follower band, agrees terms with them on your behalf, and makes sure the content arrives, discloses properly and gets measured. That is the entire product. The confusion comes from the same label being used by software vendors selling a searchable database, by marketplaces selling a pool of creators bidding against each other, and by consultants selling a strategy document. Those are three different things at three different prices, and only one of them ends with somebody chasing a creator who has gone quiet four days before your launch. What follows is what the work involves, how the routes compare, exactly what we charge, the questions worth asking any agency before you sign, and the cases where you should not hire one at all.
The work behind the label
Ten things sit between deciding to use creators and having content you can put behind ad spend. Almost all of them are administrative, and every one of them takes longer than a first-timer expects.
- Deciding whether you are buying content, audience access, or both. They are priced differently and confusing them is the most expensive early mistake.
- Building a candidate list whose audience matches your customer, then opening every account and reading it like a person rather than trusting a score.
- Getting rates. Most creators in this band do not publish one, and the first number they send is an opening position.
- Contracting: deliverables, deadlines, usage rights, exclusivity, revision limits, kill fee and payment terms, in writing.
- Briefing, which means one message written for that creator, not one message copied to forty of them.
- Shipping product and tracking who received what, because a parcel sitting at a depot is the most common cause of a missed date.
- Approvals, including reading the caption for a disclosure that meets the rules before anything goes live.
- Chasing. This is the largest single block of hours and nobody budgets for it.
- Replacing whoever disappears, fast enough that the launch date survives.
- Reporting: what ran, what it cost, what it produced, and which names are worth booking a second time.
A founder can do every line on that list. Plenty do, and the first campaign is a reasonable thing to run yourself because you learn what you are actually buying. The question is only whether your next twenty to forty hours are worth more spent here or somewhere else in the business.
Agency, software, or your own time
Four ways to get this done, with the honest version of what each leaves on your desk. Figures are Canadian dollars and are typical market ranges rather than quotes.
| Route | Typical cost | What is still yours to do |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Twenty to forty hours a campaign | All ten steps, including the chasing and the replacements |
| Search software | About $70 a month for a lookup tool, $200 to $500 for a platform, often on a twelve-month contract | Everything except producing names |
| Marketplace | A percentage from you, frequently plus a second cut taken from the creator | Briefing and quality control, against a pool that competes mainly on price |
| Traditional agency | Retainers commonly open around $1,500 a month or a five-figure campaign minimum | Little, if your campaign is large enough that they will take it |
| Four Cents Media | Free shortlist, then 20% of creator spend, $400 minimum | Approve the shortlist, approve the content, pay the creators |
The sensible line is roughly this. Under about a thousand dollars of creator spend, do it yourself and keep the money in product and postage. Between one and five thousand, paying somebody is usually worth it because the admin does not shrink with the budget. Above roughly ten thousand a month, hiring the function in-house starts to beat paying for it.
Influencer Marketing Hub's 2026 survey found 56.5 per cent of reported quality problems came down to fake or bot followers. That is the one part of this job software genuinely helps with, and also the part that still needs somebody to look at the account.
What we charge, and the four things we never charge for
Written out so you can compare it against anything else you have been quoted.
| What | Price | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Shortlist | Free | Names, their own rates, recent work, and an honest read on whether your budget is enough |
| One campaign | 20% of creator spend | Minimum $400. Sourcing, contracts, briefs, approvals, chasing, reporting |
| Ongoing | From $900 a month | No minimum term, no notice period beyond the month you are in |
The four things that are never on an invoice
- Creators are never charged. No application fee, no listing fee, no subscription, and not a cent taken out of what a creator is paid. Our income comes from the brand side only.
- Creator rates are never marked up. The number you see is the number the creator set for themselves and the number they receive.
- There is no software licence. You are not renting a dashboard from us, and if a search tool is all you need, several exist and cost less than we do.
- There is no minimum term on the ongoing plan. Nothing here renews automatically or locks you into a year.
Two more things you should hear early. We do not guarantee results, because nobody can honestly promise a creator campaign will perform. And we never hold client or creator money: there is no escrow here, you pay each creator directly, and that means you can see exactly what they got.
What to ask before you sign with anybody
Eight questions. Ask them of us too. The answers separate a managed service from a list rental faster than any case study will.
- Do you take anything out of the creator's fee, and will you show me the creator's own rate in writing?
- Who owns the content after the campaign, and for how long may I run it as an ad? Get this in the contract, not in an email.
- What happens if a creator misses the deadline, and who pays for the replacement?
- How did you verify the audience, and when did you measure the engagement rate you are quoting me?
- Who writes the brief, who approves the post, and who checks that the disclosure is compliant?
- Is there a minimum term, an auto-renewal, or a notice period, and where in the document does it say so?
- What is the total I will have paid when this campaign ends, split between creator fees and your fee?
- What does this budget not buy? An agency that cannot answer that question has not thought about your budget.
If a question about money gets an answer about strategy, ask it again. It is a fair question and there is a number behind it.
Four reasons not to hire a micro-influencer agency
We would rather lose a small job than take one we cannot make work. These are the situations where the honest answer is no.
You have under a thousand dollars to spend
At that level our minimum fee is a meaningful share of the total, which is a bad trade for you. Send product instead, or buy a handful of videos for your own ad account and run them yourself.
Your product is not ready
Creator content is a magnifier. If the landing page converts badly, or the shipping takes three weeks, or the reviews are mixed, this will make those problems more visible rather than less. Fix the thing first.
You want a guaranteed sales number
Nobody can sell you that, and anybody who offers it is either guessing or counting something that is not revenue. If your board needs a guaranteed return this quarter, buy ads with a measurable cost per acquisition instead.
You already have someone doing it
If a marketing coordinator is running creators and enjoying it, buying a search tool and a contract template beats paying us. Come back when the volume outgrows one person's calendar.
Questions
What counts as a micro-influencer?
Roughly ten thousand to one hundred thousand followers. Below that is nano, above it is mid-tier. The band matters less than the fit: a creator with twelve thousand followers who all cook is worth more to a cookware brand than one with ninety thousand general followers. Treat the tier as a budgeting shorthand, not a quality ranking.
Is an agency worth it for a single campaign?
Sometimes. The admin load barely changes between one campaign and six, so a single campaign carries the full overhead. If you intend to keep using creators, the first campaign is where the process gets built and paying for it is reasonable. If this is a one-off for a single launch and you have the hours, run it yourself and use our free shortlist as the starting list.
Do you take a percentage of what the creator earns?
No. Our fee is twenty per cent of creator spend with a four hundred dollar minimum, and it is paid by you, on top of the creator fees, not out of them. The creator sets their rate, you see that rate, and they receive it in full. We also never hold the money: you pay each creator directly and there is no escrow in the middle.
Can you guarantee the campaign will work?
No, and you should treat a guarantee as a warning sign rather than a selling point. What can be promised is the process: creators matched to the brief, rates agreed in writing, a contract with deliverables and dates, disclosure that meets Canadian and United States rules, and a report at the end showing what ran and what it did. If a creator fails to deliver we replace them and they come off the roster.
How long does a first campaign take?
A shortlist comes back within a few business days of a clear brief. From signed scope to delivered content is usually two to four weeks. The two things that stretch it are shipping product and your own approval rounds, so if you have a hard launch date, work backwards from it and add a week.
We are outside Canada. Does that change anything?
The fee is the same. What changes is the rules that apply: content reaching United States audiences falls under the FTC endorsement guides in addition to Canadian requirements, and those guides make the agency liable alongside the brand for an undisclosed paid endorsement. That is handled inside the campaign rather than billed as an extra.
General information, not legal advice. Prices are in Canadian dollars and exclude tax.
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Tell us the product and the budget. Names, rates and recent work come back at no cost.