How to Price Your First Brand Deal on X (and Say No)

A creator in our network forwarded me a DM in March. Seed-stage founder, meeting-notes app, and the offer read: "we'd love to work with you, we can do product access plus a rev share." She'd been posting five days a week for two years and had just crossed 31,000 followers. Her first instinct was to say yes because someone had finally asked.

I told her the offer was worth approximately nothing and she should reply with a flat number and a two-line scope. She did. I'm not going to publish what she charged, but it was four figures, and the founder agreed within an hour without countering.

That's the part most creators get wrong on the first one. Not the number. The fact that they let the brand name it.

The brand always has a budget, and they will never open with it

Every founder who DMs a creator has already decided what they can spend. They have a line item. They have a spreadsheet with four other creators on it. When they open with "what are your rates?" they're not asking an open question, they're checking whether you'll come in under a number they already wrote down.

So the first move is never a discount and never a range. It's a question back:

Happy to. Before I send rates, two things: what's the campaign window, and is there a budget band you're working inside? I price differently for a one-post test versus a launch week.

Roughly half the founders I've watched get this message answer with an actual number. The other half say "we're flexible," which is its own answer, and then you send your rate card and hold.

The reason this works on X specifically is that founder budgets here are small and fast. This isn't a beauty brand running a quarterly cycle through an agency. It's usually one person with $3,000 who wants to launch in eleven days. They'd rather pay your number than restart sourcing.

What do you charge when you have no data?

With no deal history, price off delivered attention rather than follower count. Pull your median impressions from your last 20 organic posts, divide by 1,000, and charge $20 to $40 per thousand for a single sponsored post. A creator averaging 40,000 impressions per post lands somewhere near $800 to $1,600.

That CPM range is my own rule of thumb from deals I've brokered on X, not a published industry benchmark. Treat it as a starting floor you adjust, and be honest with yourself about the median. Use the median, not the mean. One post that did 900k because a big account quote-posted it is not your baseline, it's a lottery ticket, and pricing off it means you'll underdeliver on the very first invoice you ever send.

Then you add for everything the brand wants beyond a single post existing on your timeline.

Usage rights are the single most common thing creators hand over without noticing. A brand that runs your post as a paid ad is buying your face and your credibility as ad creative, potentially in front of people who've never heard of you, for as long as the campaign runs. That is a different product from a post on your timeline. Price it separately or exclude it in writing.

Your first rate card, which should fit on one screen

Don't build a PDF. Nobody opens the PDF. Put this in a Notion page or a plain text block you can paste into a DM in four seconds.

Line item	What it covers	Illustrative rate	Note
Single post	One post, my words, stays up permanently	$1,000	Base unit. Everything else is a multiple of this.
Post + follow-up reply	Adds one reply from me with the link or a detail	$1,250	Usually converts better than the post alone.
Thread, 4 to 6 posts	Written and structured by me	$2,000	Not 5x a single post. It's one idea, not five.
Quote-post of your launch post	Amplification with my commentary	$600	Cheapest useful thing a founder can buy.
Video demo under 60s	Scripted, shot, edited by me	$2,500	Reshoots billed separately.
Paid ad usage, 90 days	You may run my post as an ad	+30% of fee	Not included by default. Ever.
Category exclusivity, 30 days	No paid posts for direct competitors	+25% of fee	Category defined in writing, narrowly.
Rush, live within 72 hours	Jumps my queue	+20%	Applies from signed brief, not from first DM.
Revisions	One round included	+$150/round after	Factual corrections are always free.
Kill fee	You cancel after I've drafted	50% of fee	Non-negotiable, and nobody has ever fought me on it.

Two things about this card that people push back on.

The thread isn't five times a post. I've had creators try to bill threads as 5x and it kills deals, because a thread is one idea delivered in sequence and the brand knows it. Charge roughly double.

The kill fee is the item that makes you feel greedy and it's the one you should never drop. Founders change direction constantly. Somebody will pull a campaign the day after you've written 600 words of drafts, and 50% is the difference between an annoying week and a free week of work.

Which deals to turn down

Here's the honest version: your first paid deal sets the floor for every deal after it, because founders talk to each other and because you will anchor yourself. A bad first deal is worse than no first deal.

"We'll pay you in exposure." No. Exposure from a brand with fewer followers than you is a transfer of value in the wrong direction. If they genuinely have no cash, the only version worth considering is a swap where you get something with a price tag: a lifetime license you'd otherwise buy, an intro to a specific person by name, or a slot in a newsletter with a real subscriber count. Everything else is a favor, and favors are fine, just call it a favor and don't let it set your rate.

Affiliate-only, no fee. This one is more tempting because it sounds fair. It isn't, because you're carrying all the risk on a product whose landing page, pricing, and onboarding you don't control. You write a good post, 340 people click, the checkout flow is broken on mobile, you earn $0. I've seen conversion on a genuinely good creator post land under 1% on a product with a rough signup flow. Affiliate on top of a flat fee is great. Affiliate instead of a flat fee means you've been hired as a salesperson and given no control over the store.

No brief. "Just say whatever feels natural" sounds generous and is actually a trap, because with nothing written down the brand's expectations live only in their head, and you'll find out what they were during revisions. Ask for one page: what the product does, who it's for, one thing they want mentioned, one thing they don't want said, the link, and the deadline.

Approval over your wording. Factual approval is reasonable. Somebody at the company should check that you didn't say the free tier includes something it doesn't. Copy approval is different, and it's where sponsored posts go to die. A brand marketer rewriting your post into their voice produces something your audience will scroll past and remember you for. My line, which I give creators verbatim: "You get approval on facts, claims, and the link. I keep final say on wording, because the wording is what you're paying for."

Exclusivity with no premium. A 90-day non-compete across "productivity tools" for a $900 post is a bad trade, because you've just made yourself unbookable in your own category for a quarter. Two fixes: charge for it, and define the category narrowly in writing. "Direct competitors to [named product]" is workable. "AI tools" is not.

Payment after performance. Watch for "we'll pay the second half if it hits 50k views." You don't control the algorithm, you don't control whether they launch the same day as something bigger, and you don't control whether their own account amplifies you. Standard terms: 50% on signature, 50% within 14 days of the post going live. Hold that line on the first deal and you'll never have to argue it again.

Structure	Who carries the risk	When it's actually fine
Flat fee	Brand	Always. This is the default and you should make them talk you out of it.
Flat fee + affiliate	Shared	Great deal for a product you'd recommend anyway.
Affiliate only	You	Only if you were going to post about it unpaid regardless.
Performance bonus after a floor	Shared	Fine when the floor alone is a rate you'd accept.
Product or "exposure" only	You	When the product costs more than your rate, and you want it.

Disclosure, which costs you less than you think

Label it. Every time. #ad near the top of the post, not buried in the fourth line, not in a reply, not as #sp or #collab or partner in a way a reader could miss.

The US requirement here isn't vague. The FTC's Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers says disclosure has to be hard to miss and placed so people notice it without hunting, and the underlying Endorsement Guides cover free product, not just cash. If a company sent you a free annual plan in exchange for a post, that's a material connection and it gets labeled.

The fear is that #ad tanks reach or makes people trust you less. In my experience the thing that damages trust is a post that reads like an ad without saying so, which your audience clocks immediately and then holds against you for months. The label is what lets you be enthusiastic on purpose. You said it's paid, so nobody has to spend the post working out if it's paid, and they can spend it deciding if you're right about the product.

One more: if the brand asks you to skip the disclosure, that's the end of the conversation. Not a negotiation point. A brand willing to put your account at risk to save a hashtag will not be a good partner about anything else, and I've never once seen that instinct show up in isolation.

Writing the post so it doesn't cost you your audience

You spent two years building the thing the brand is buying. The post should read like the other posts.

The weakness line is the part brands resist and the part that makes the post work. When you say the mobile app is rough, every other sentence in the post becomes believable, including the sentence the brand is paying for. I've watched founders ask to cut it and I've watched the edited version underperform the draft. If you can, get one sentence into the brief: "I include at least one honest limitation. It's why people believe the rest."

Post it on a day you'd normally post, at your normal time, with no scheduling tool that strips your voice. Then stay in the replies for two hours. The replies are where the actual conversions happen and most creators walk away after hitting send, which is like catering an event and leaving before anyone eats.

Send the brand a screenshot of your post analytics 48 hours later, unprompted: impressions, engagements, link clicks, profile visits. Almost nobody does this. It's the single cheapest way to turn one deal into three, because the founder now has a number to put in front of whoever controls the budget.

Charge for the second post more than the first. You have data now.

If you'd rather have deals arrive already scoped and priced instead of negotiating each one from scratch, that's what we do: apply to the Wiral network, or look at how other creators list their niche and rates first and see where you'd sit.