What influencer marketing platforms actually cost.

Enterprise platforms bundle creator discovery marketplaces, contracts, payments and reporting into one product. They're generally sold through a demo call on an annual commitment, and the price reflects the marketplace and the account team behind it.

Self-serve tracking and reporting tools do the measurement half only: pull post performance, keep it current, and turn it into a report a client will accept. They publish their prices, bill monthly, and cost tens of dollars rather than thousands.

If your bottleneck is finding creators, the first market is worth the money. If your bottleneck is proving what the campaign did, you're paying a large premium for features you don't open.

• Seats. The most common lever. Watch whether client logins count as seats — for an agency that can double the bill.
• Active campaigns. Caps on how many campaigns can run at once.
• Tracked posts or creators. Some tools meter the volume of content being refreshed.
• Client portals and white labelling. Usually reserved for the top tier, which is exactly the tier agencies need.

Client logins are included in the same seat allowance — brand-client portals with per-brand access come with the Agency plan. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no card required to look around, and no annual commitment.

Work out what the reporting currently costs you in time. If a monthly client report takes one person a day, and you produce four of them, that's four days a month. Any tool that removes most of that and costs less than half a day of that person's time has already paid for itself — the rest of the evaluation is about whether the data is trustworthy and whether your client will accept the output.

Related: the small-agency buyer's guide.