Thomas MarcelleCEO & Co-founderI spend a lot of my week looking at a database of what brands offer LinkedIn creators and what happens next. One pattern in it has changed my mind about advice I used to give.
The advice was: when you're starting out, price low to get the first few deals, then raise your rate once you have a track record. It sounds obviously right. It is how you'd price almost anything else.
The data makes that advice less safe than it sounds. It does not show that a low price "signals low quality," and it cannot prove that price causes an outcome. It does show that lower-priced bookings in this snapshot reached publication less often and that low offers expired without an answer more often.
What the bookings actually do
Here's the number that changed my view. Of the sponsored-post bookings on our marketplace that reached a final state, 80.6% of those priced above €600 per post ended in a published post. Under €200, it was 30.8% [Naano Index, n=41 and n=114 settled bookings, snapshot at 2026-08-03 21:10 UTC].
I want to be careful here, because the obvious reading is too flattering to expensive creators. This isn't proof that charging more makes you deliver. A brand paying €600 is a brand with a real budget, a real brief, and someone internally whose job depends on the campaign shipping. Some of that gap is the brand, not you.
But there's a second number underneath it that is about us, and it's the uncomfortable one. Nearly 35% of offers under €200 simply expired — the creator never answered at all. Above €600, that was 8% [Naano Index, n=204 settled offers].
Read that again. On cheap offers, creators don't say no. We go quiet. The offer sits in a tab, it's worth less than a decent hourly rate, there's always something more urgent, and the window closes. Nobody made a decision. The deal just decayed.
I've done this. You've probably done this. It feels like nothing — you didn't take on work you didn't want. But from the brand's side you didn't decline, you flaked, and you spent two weeks of their campaign calendar doing it. That's the cost that doesn't show up anywhere: not the €150 you didn't earn, but the brand that will never send you a second offer.
Discounting concentrates at the bottom, not the top
The other thing the data shows is where negotiation actually lives.
In the €100–€199 band, the average agreed discount was 37%. Above €600 per post, exactly one booking out of 41 was negotiated at all [Naano Index, June–August 2026].
That's the opposite of what I'd have guessed. You'd think the big numbers attract the haggling — that's where the money is. In practice, expensive creators get paid their asking price and cheap creators get asked for a third off. A €150 post gets negotiated to €95; a €900 post gets accepted.
I don't think brands are being predatory about it. I think a listed rate below €200 reads as provisional. It doesn't look like a price, it looks like an opening position — so it gets treated as one. And once you've taken 37% off a rate that was already at the bottom of the market, you're working for an amount that makes the tab-closing problem above nearly inevitable.
Just over 40% of the creators open for bookings in the snapshot list a rate under €100 per post [Naano Index, 40.2%, n=719, snapshot at 2026-08-03 21:10 UTC]. That's a lot of people who have opted into the lowest listed-price band.
Your follower count is not your price
The part of this I find genuinely liberating: follower count explains under a third of what B2B creators charge.
We regressed listed price against follower count for the 719 creators open for bookings. The log-log R² came out at 0.290 [Naano Index, snapshot at 2026-08-03 21:10 UTC]. About 71% of the variation in listed price is not explained by follower count in this one-variable model.
And the spread is enormous. Among creators with 10,000–25,000 followers, the P10 listed price is €25 per post and the P90 is €633. Same follower tier, a 25.3× ratio in the same snapshot.
If you've been benchmarking yourself against a rate card that says "10K–25K followers: €X", stop. There is no €X. There's a range so wide it isn't a benchmark, and where you land inside it is decided by things you actually control:
- How specific your audience is. In our data, Outreach has 27 available creators at a €250 median listed price, while AI has 397 at €100. That contrast is descriptive; the snapshot does not isolate scarcity from audience quality, geography or other factors.
- Whether your engagement is real. A creator whose posts pull genuine comments from job titles a brand recognises is worth multiples of one with the same followers and a comment section full of other creators. If you don't know your own number, our engagement rate calculator takes thirty seconds.
- Whether you've ever said a price out loud without flinching. I'm not being glib. The 25x spread is mostly a confidence spread.
The clearest example in our data: creators who list cybersecurity as their niche have a €50 median rate — the lowest of any niche we measured — despite a median audience size in line with everyone else, and only twelve of them exist on the whole marketplace. Twelve people covering an entire enterprise software category, priced below generalists. Nobody told them their scarcity was worth anything.
What to do instead of discounting
I'm not arguing you should never move on price. I'm arguing that "same work, less money" is the one move that reliably makes things worse. Here's what I'd do instead, in roughly this order.
Cut the scope, not the rate. If a brand's budget is genuinely €150 and you're at €300, offer them something that is honestly worth €150 — a shorter post, no custom visual, no revision round, no usage rights. Your per-post rate survives the conversation. This is the single highest-leverage habit in the list, because your listed rate is a public artefact that follows you into every future negotiation.
Trade the discount for something. Ten to fifteen percent is a reasonable move if it buys you three posts booked at once, four weeks of lead time instead of one, or the right to publish the results as a case study. What you must not do is give the discount for goodwill. Goodwill is not a deliverable and it will not be there next quarter.
Price the usage rights separately, at booking. If they want to run your post as a Thought Leader Ad, that's a different product. Agree the duration, territory and fee before the post goes live so both sides know what the organic-post price includes.
Answer every offer, including the ones you're rejecting. This is the cheapest professional advantage available to you. "Thanks — my rate for this is €300, happy to do a shorter version at €180" is enough to close the loop and preserve the option of a counter-offer.
Raise your listed rate when nobody hesitates. The signal isn't demand, it's friction. If every single brand accepts your price without a pause, your price is under the market. A rate that occasionally gets a "can you do better?" is a rate positioned correctly.
The part I'd tell my past self
The reason low pricing feels safe is that it looks like it removes risk. You'd rather have a €120 booking than no booking.
But the €120 booking is not necessarily a smaller version of the €600 booking. In this snapshot, lower-priced settled bookings were published less often, although the data cannot tell us how much of the gap comes from price, brief quality, brand readiness, creator availability or another factor. Treat the pattern as a risk signal, not a promise about any individual deal.
Two well-matched sponsored posts a month at a rate you'd say out loud without flinching will earn you more, cost you less audience goodwill, and — this is the part the data actually supports — be far more likely to exist.
If you want a defensible starting number rather than a feeling, the creator worth calculator will give you a range from your audience and engagement, and the full transacted distribution is in the LinkedIn sponsored post price index. Then publish it, and let the first brand who hesitates tell you it's about right.
Naano is where B2B brands book LinkedIn creators at a flat fee per post — your rate, set by you, published on your profile. Contracts, escrow and invoicing handled; no commission on top of your listed price. Publish your rate on Naano.
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