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Enter how many creators you are sending product to, what the product and the postage cost you, then your own estimates for how many accept and how many post. The calculator shows the outlay and divides it by the parcels, the acceptances and the posts. Every rate in it is one you supplied.
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Product, packaging, postage and any per-creator fee are incurred the moment you ship. None of that comes back if the creator never posts. The calculator totals the full outlay first and only then starts dividing, so the cost of the parcels that went nowhere stays in the arithmetic instead of disappearing from it.
How many creators accept the parcel, and how many of those actually post, are the two numbers that decide what a seeding campaign really costs. They are also the two numbers nobody can tell you in advance. The calculator asks for both and shows what each one does to the cost per post.
Cost per parcel is what you spent to ship. Cost per acceptance is what you spent per creator who engaged. Cost per published post is what the content actually cost you. The three numbers can be very far apart, and the gap between the first and the last is the honest price of seeding.
Product seeding gets described as the free version of influencer marketing, on the grounds that nobody is paid a fee. That is true about the fee and misleading about the cost. You pay for every parcel you send, in goods and in postage, and you pay whether or not anything comes back.
The number that matters is therefore not what a parcel costs. It is what a post costs, which is the whole outlay divided by the posts you actually got. Those two figures can be an order of magnitude apart, and the gap is entirely made of parcels that went out and produced nothing.
A per-parcel cost is easy to work out and easy to approve. It is also the only cost in the campaign that is certain, which makes it comfortable to plan with. The problem is that it describes a shipping operation rather than a marketing one. You did not buy parcels. You bought whatever posts came out the other end.
Seeding campaigns are usually judged after the fact on how many posts appeared, and the cost per post is then worked out by someone in a spreadsheet who is often surprised. Doing that arithmetic before the campaign, with your own honest estimates, is the only way the number informs a decision rather than explaining one.
None of this makes seeding a bad idea. It is often a very good one, particularly when the product does the persuading and the audience you want is large and cheap to reach. The point is that you should know which cost you are quoting when you call it cheap, because the two costs answer to different questions.
Five lines make up the outlay and all five are spent at dispatch. Nothing on this list depends on the campaign working.
The per-creator fee box is worth attention because it quietly changes the shape of the campaign. A fee per creator scales with the list, exactly like the product does, so it pushes up the cost per post in the same way. A one-off setup fee does the opposite. It is fixed, so the more parcels you send the less it matters per post. Entering them separately rather than as one blended cost is what makes that visible.
Your own time is not on this list, which is a deliberate omission rather than an oversight. Seeding takes real coordination work, and if you want it counted, the cost calculator has a box for hours and an hourly rate. Keeping it off this page stops the cost per post from being partly an estimate of your own labour.
Fill the boxes, press the button and the outlay, the funnel and the three unit costs all appear together.
Every row names what it multiplied or divided, including the rounding, so you can reproduce it by hand.
There is no acceptance rate, posting rate or product cost anywhere in this page. Those are the numbers you bring.
Price commissioned content with the UGC calculator, total a whole programme with the cost calculator and fit it to a budget with the budget calculator.
The maths runs on your device. No cost, no margin and no creator list is sent anywhere.
The calculator asks for the share of creators who accept the parcel and then the share of those who go on to post. They are separate questions and they fail for different reasons, which is why they are separate boxes.
Acceptance is about whether the creator wants the product and is willing to take it. Posting is about whether they liked it enough, remembered to, found a slot for it and were not put off by whatever the brief asked. Someone can accept enthusiastically and never post, and that parcel costs you exactly as much as one that worked.
If you leave both percentages blank the calculator treats them as everyone, which produces the most optimistic possible answer. That is the right default because it makes no assumption, and it is also the answer least likely to be true. Filling them in is the whole point of the tool.
Counts are rounded down to whole creators throughout, because a fraction of a person cannot post. That means a small list with modest percentages can round all the way to zero posts, and the calculator says so rather than reporting a fractional post. A zero there is useful information. It tells you the list is too short for the rates you expect, and the fix is more parcels or better targeting rather than a different calculation.
The same outlay is divided three times, and each division answers a different question. Reading all three together is more useful than looking at any one of them.
Cost per parcel sent is the operational number. It is what logistics and finance will recognise and it is the figure you can commit to before anything happens. Cost per creator who accepts narrows it to the people who actually engaged with the campaign at all. Cost per published post is the marketing number, and it is the only one that reflects what you got.
The distance between the first and the third figure is a measure of waste, but not necessarily avoidable waste. Some of it is the price of reaching creators who were never going to post, which is unavoidable unless you can tell in advance which ones those are. The calculator adds a line for the spend that produced no post so the amount is explicit rather than implied.
If that line is large relative to the total, there are only three levers. Send fewer and better targeted parcels, which raises the acceptance and posting rates. Spend less per parcel, which lowers the cost of the ones that fail. Or accept the number, because the posts you did get were worth it. All three are legitimate and the arithmetic does not rank them.
The posts per posting creator box matters more than it looks. A creator who posts twice halves the cost per post without any change to the outlay, which makes asking for a second piece of content one of the cheapest improvements available to a seeding campaign. Set it above one only if that is genuinely what the brief asks for and what you expect to get.
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The last two rows report the retail value of everything you shipped and the gap between that value and your actual outlay. They are there because that number gets quoted a lot, usually in a campaign summary, and it is not a cost.
Retail value is what the product would have sold for. The difference between it and your cost is your own margin, which never left the business. Counting it as campaign spend makes the campaign look far more expensive than it was and makes every cost per post figure meaningless.
Keep the two numbers in separate sentences and the arithmetic stays honest. The calculator shows both and labels the retail line as not a cost, so a screenshot of the result cannot be read the wrong way round. If you leave the retail box empty the lines come out at zero and nothing is implied about your margin at all.
It will not guess your acceptance rate, your posting rate, your cost of goods or your postage. There is no figure for any of those in this page or in the script behind it, and nothing is filled in on your behalf except the two percentages, which default to everyone and therefore add nothing.
Acceptance and posting rates in particular are the worst possible thing to supply as a general number. They depend on the product, the creator list, how the outreach was written, whether there was any prior relationship, the season and whether the brief asked for something awkward. A single figure would be wrong for nearly every campaign and would land inside a cost per post that looked authoritative.
If you have never run a seeding campaign and have no rates to enter, the most useful thing this calculator can do is show you how sensitive the cost per post is to those two percentages. Run it with the percentages you hope for, then again with half of each, and look at how far the cost per post moves. The size of that movement is the real risk in the campaign, and it is worth knowing before the product ships rather than after.
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The numbers here are made up so the funnel is easy to follow. None of them is a rate, and the whole thing recomputes the moment you type your own.
Say you send single units to 60 creators. The product costs you $18 a unit, packaging is $2.50 a parcel and postage is $6.20. There is no per-creator fee but there is a $400 one-off setup cost. You estimate that 65 percent of the creators accept and that 70 percent of those post once each. Retail price is $49.
The three unit costs on these made-up figures are $33.37, $51.33 and $74.15. The last one is more than double the first, and the whole difference is the 33 creators who did not post. If someone summarised this campaign as costing thirty-three dollars a creator they would be describing the shipping accurately and the marketing not at all.
Notice also what the setup fee does. It is $400 of a $2,002 outlay, so it is a fifth of the campaign and it is fixed. Doubling the list to 120 creators would roughly double the product and postage but leave the setup fee alone, which would push the cost per post down. That is the kind of question this calculator answers quickly, and it is a different answer for every set of numbers somebody types in.
The calculator is free and needs no signup. Who you send product to is what decides the acceptance rate, and the full platform adds discovery, audience data and authenticity scoring to help you choose.
It costs whatever your product, packaging, postage and fees cost, multiplied by the number of parcels you send. That part is arithmetic on your own figures. What people usually want to know is the cost per published post, which depends on how many creators accept and how many of those post, and nobody can tell you those two numbers in advance. This calculator asks you for them and does the division. It supplies no rate of its own.
Because you pay for every parcel and only some of them become a post. Product, packaging and postage are all spent at dispatch and none of it comes back if the creator stays quiet. The outlay divided by the parcels sent is the shipping cost. The same outlay divided by the posts you actually got is the content cost, and the gap between the two is the price of the parcels that produced nothing. The calculator shows both so the gap is visible.
At cost, for anything to do with what the campaign cost you. Retail price includes your margin, which never left the business, so using it inflates the campaign and makes every cost per post figure wrong. The calculator has a separate retail box that reports the value you sent out and labels it as not a cost, because the retail figure is useful for stock and customs conversations and useless for cost ones.
Your own. The best source is your last seeding campaign if you counted the posts honestly, and the next best is a small test send to a short list. Both percentages default to everyone if you leave them blank, which gives the most optimistic answer the arithmetic can produce. A more useful approach is to run the calculator twice, once with the rates you hope for and once with half of each, and look at how far the cost per post moves.
Because counts are rounded down to whole creators and a fraction of a person cannot post. On a short list with modest percentages the arithmetic can round all the way to zero. That is real rather than a glitch. It means the list is too short to reliably produce even one post at the rates you entered, and the answer is more parcels or better targeting rather than a different calculation.
Yes. It is free and needs no signup or card. Everything runs in your browser, so no cost, margin or creator list is sent anywhere. It pairs with the UGC pricing calculator when you are commissioning content rather than hoping for it, with the cost calculator for a whole programme and with the budget calculator when the seeding has to fit inside a fixed number.
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