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Set a reach target, then describe the two routes you are choosing between: how much reach one creator delivers on each route, what one costs and how many minutes of your own time each one takes. The calculator works out how many creators each route needs, what each route costs in total and the fee at which the two break even. It never asks which tier a creator belongs to, because it does not need to know.
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You cannot book three fifths of a creator. The calculator divides your reach target by the reach one creator delivers and rounds up to the next whole creator, then shows you how much reach that rounding added. On a route built from small creators the rounding is barely visible. On a route built from large ones it can hand you a lot of reach you did not ask for and did pay for.
Twenty creators and two creators do not cost the same to run even when the fees match, and the difference lands on your calendar rather than your invoice. You give the calculator the minutes one creator takes you and your own cost per hour, and it prices the admin on each route and adds it to the total. Set the hourly cost to zero and you get the fee-only comparison instead.
The useful output is not which route wins on the figures you happened to type. It is the fee per creator at which the two routes cost exactly the same. Once you have that number you can look at the quotes in your inbox and see immediately which side of it they fall on, without rerunning anything.
The question usually arrives as a choice between two words. Should we work with a lot of small creators or a handful of bigger ones. Phrased that way it has no answer, because the words do not carry any of the information the decision needs.
What the decision actually needs is four things. How much reach you are trying to buy, how much reach one creator on each route delivers, what one creator on each route costs and how much of your own time each one takes. Give it those and the answer is a division followed by a comparison. No label required, and no agreement needed about what the labels mean.
So the calculator asks for those and nothing else. There is no field anywhere on this page for which tier a creator is in, because there is nothing the arithmetic could do with the answer. Once you have entered the reach and the fee, the label adds no information.
That is also why the comparison stays honest when your two routes are close together in size. If your two routes sit close together in size, no convention will tell you whether they count as different tiers, and it does not matter: the division works exactly the same way. The tool is comparing two sizes, not two categories.
You will not find a follower count on this page marking where one creator label stops and the next begins. That is deliberate and it is worth explaining rather than leaving you to wonder whether it was an oversight.
Those boundaries are a naming convention, not a measurement. They were settled by usage across agencies, platforms and write-ups, and they were settled differently in different places. One source will put the cut in one place and another will put it somewhere else, and neither of them is wrong, because there is nothing underneath the line to be right about. No property of a creator or an audience changes as a follower count crosses a line somebody chose.
If you do need a boundary for your own planning, use your own. Decide what sizes you are actually choosing between, enter those two sizes and the tool will compare them. That is the version of the question that has an answer.
The conventional names are still useful as shorthand when you talk to people, which is why they are in the title of this page. They are a way of saying roughly how big, quickly. They are not a measurement, and this calculator does not treat them as one.
Call the routes whatever you like. The maths needs two creator sizes and two prices, not a taxonomy.
Each line names the division or multiplication behind it, so the result can be redone on paper.
Coordination is the cost that sinks the many-creators route, and it is the one most comparisons leave out.
No fee, creator size or hourly rate is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in the browser.
Once you have picked a route, the cost calculator totals the whole programme and the budget calculator splits a fixed budget across it.
Two of the fields are required and the rest shape the answer. Here is what each one is and how to fill it without guessing.
The number of people you want the campaign to reach. Required, because everything else divides into it. If you are working to impressions rather than people, enter impressions and read every reach line as impressions: the arithmetic does not change, as long as you are consistent across both routes.
If you have no target and are working from a budget instead, this is the wrong tool and the budget calculator is the right one. That page starts from the money and divides downwards. This one starts from the reach and prices upwards.
How much reach one creator on that route delivers from the deliverable you are buying. Required for both routes. For video, average views is usually the closest honest number. For static posts you may only have followers, which overstates reach for most accounts, so if you use followers use them for both routes and treat the result as a comparison rather than a forecast.
Take an average across several recent posts rather than a single one, and take it over the same number of posts on both routes. An average built from three posts on one route and thirty on the other is not comparing like with like, and the difference will show up as a cost difference that is really a sampling difference.
What one creator on that route costs you for the deliverable you counted the reach for. Use quotes you have actually been given wherever you have them. Where you have several quotes on a route, use their average and keep in mind that the break-even fee the tool prints is the number to compare individual quotes against later.
Leave a fee at zero and that route costs only your own time, which is the right arithmetic for a gifting route where no fee is paid. The comparison between a paid route and a gifted route is one of the more useful things this page does, because the gifted route is never actually free once the hours are counted.
Minutes covers everything one creator costs you personally: finding them, writing to them, chasing a reply, agreeing terms, briefing, reviewing drafts, handling revisions and chasing the post. Count it honestly. This is the field people underestimate and it is the field that decides the comparison most often.
Your cost per hour turns those minutes into money so they can be added to the fees. Use a loaded hourly cost for whoever will actually do the work. Set it to zero if you want the fee-only comparison, and the hours will still be reported as hours so you can see what you are choosing to ignore.
Every number here is invented to show the arithmetic. None of it is a rate, a quote, a reach figure or a reference for anything. These are also the grey hints in the form above, so you can run the example and then type over it.
Route B is cheaper, by $200, which is 1.03 times the cost of Route A. That is a much narrower result than the fee totals suggest on their own, and it only comes out that way because the hours were counted. On fees alone Route A looked $1,000 cheaper. Thirty extra hours of coordination wiped that out and then some.
The break-even fee is the figure worth keeping. Route B costs $7,300 in total, Route A carries $1,500 of your own hours, so the fees Route A can afford are $7,300 less $1,500, which is $5,800 across 50 creators, which is $116 each. At $116 a creator the two routes cost exactly the same. The example used $120, which is why Route B edged it.
That number is far more useful than the verdict. It means you can stop rerunning the comparison every time a quote lands and simply ask whether the small creators will work for $116. If they will, Route A is cheaper. If they want more than that, Route B is, on these inputs. And if you can cut the 45 minutes per creator down, the break-even fee rises and Route A gets easier to justify, which tells you that the lever on the many-creators route is process rather than price.
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The headline is the total cost of whichever route came out cheaper on your inputs. That is a statement about your inputs and nothing more. It does not say that route is better, that the fees on it are reasonable or that the creators on it will perform. It says that with the sizes, fees and minutes you typed, the arithmetic lands lower on one side.
Because creators come in whole numbers, each route usually delivers more reach than you asked for. On a route built from large creators that overshoot can be substantial and you pay for all of it. The row that shows reach above your target is there to make that visible, since it is the quiet cost of buying in big units.
It also means a small change to your target can move the large-creator route by a whole creator and leave the small-creator route almost untouched. If your target is soft, nudging it down slightly is sometimes worth more than negotiating.
The table prints the cost per 1,000 reach twice, once from the full total and once from the fees alone. The pair tells you how much of the comparison is being carried by your own time. If the two figures are close, the routes are competing on price. If they are far apart, you are really choosing how to spend your week.
That distinction changes who should make the decision. A gap driven by fees is a budget question. A gap driven by hours is a staffing question, and the answer may be to fix the process rather than to pick the other route.
Cost per 1,000 reach treats every thousand people as interchangeable, and they are not. The calculator has no way to know any of the following, so none of it is in the result.
None of those are reasons to skip the arithmetic. They are reasons to do it first and then argue about the rest with the numbers already settled. The cost difference and the break-even fee give the discussion a floor, so the conversation can be about whether the premium is worth paying rather than about which route sounds cheaper.
"We tested three platforms before landing on Flinque. The creator data is more reliable. The filters actually work. Our team spends half the time finding the right influencers now."
"Flinque replaced two tools we were paying for separately. Creator discovery and performance tracking in one place. And the data is actually accurate."
"Our campaign turnaround time dropped significantly after switching to Flinque. What used to take a full day of research now takes under an hour."
This page answers one question: for a reach target, which of two creator sizes costs less once your own time is counted. It is deliberately upstream of the rest. You run it before you have a creator list, while you are still deciding what shape the programme should be.
Once the shape is settled the other tools take over. The cost calculator totals a whole programme from its line items. The budget calculator starts from a fixed budget and divides it across groups. The creator comparison tool handles the next step down, where you have named candidates with quotes and you are choosing between them rather than between strategies.
The calculator is free and needs no signup. Once you know how many creators of what size you need, the full platform is where you find them, with audience data and authenticity scoring on every profile.
This page does not say, on purpose. Those boundaries are a naming convention rather than a measurement, and they are drawn in different places by different sources, so any figure printed here would be one convention adopted and then presented as a fact. Nothing in the arithmetic needs it either. The calculator asks how much reach one creator delivers and what one costs, and those two numbers do all the work the label was standing in for. If you want a boundary for your own planning, enter the two creator sizes you are actually choosing between and compare those.
Because the labels were never carrying the information. What separates the two routes arithmetically is the reach per creator and the fee per creator, and you supply both. Once the calculator knows that one route delivers 6,000 reach at one price and the other delivers 60,000 at another, which are the made-up figures from the worked example on this page, it can work out how many creators each needs, what each costs in fees and hours and where the two cross over. Adding a tier name to those numbers would not change a single line of the output.
Because it is usually the deciding cost and it is the one most comparisons leave out. Working with many small creators means repeating every step of the process many times over: the outreach, the chasing, the briefing, the review and the revisions. Those hours are real, they are paid for by somebody and they do not appear on any invoice. Entering minutes per creator and your cost per hour puts them in the total where they belong. Set the hourly cost to zero if you want the fee-only comparison, and the hours are still reported so you can see what you chose to leave out.
It is the fee per creator at which the two routes cost exactly the same, holding everything else you entered constant. It is more useful than knowing which route won, because quotes arrive one at a time and the break-even figure lets you judge each one the moment it lands without rerunning anything. It also shows you which lever matters. If the break-even fee is far above what the smaller creators are asking, that route has room. If it is below, no amount of negotiating on that route will close the gap.
Yes, and it is one of the better uses for it. Leave the fee at zero on the gifting route and enter the minutes it takes you per creator, and the tool prices that route from your own hours alone. The result is usually a surprise, because a route with no fees still costs real money once the coordination is counted, and the gap between the two routes is often much smaller than the fee difference implies. If you are sending product, add its cost into the fee field for that route so the total reflects what you actually spend.
It is free with no signup and no card, and nothing leaves your browser. Every calculation runs on your own device, so no fee, creator size, reach figure or hourly cost is sent to Flinque or anywhere else. Run it as many times as you like. When you have settled on a route and need the creators to fill it, the full platform is a searchable database of verified creators, with audience data and a fake-follower score on every profile, and it has a free plan that needs no card.
10M+ verified creators across 4 platforms, 12 filters and a fake-follower score on every profile. No card.