A thousand marketing and procurement leaders were asked a question almost nobody asks out loud: did you pay the right price?

Nearly half said no. Forty-five percent of brands said they had mispriced a creator partnership, paying either more or less than fair market value, according to Billion Dollar Boy's survey "Priced on Guesswork: The State of Creator Investment," which polled 1,000 marketing and procurement decision-makers across the U.S. and UK. Among those who mispriced, 40% paid too much and 36% paid too little — the problem runs both ways.

Then there's the view from the sell side. Danielle Wiley, CEO of influencer marketing agency Sway, told Digiday that anecdotally brands pay too much 90% of the time, and though creators are happy to get more money than they may be worth, it creates an expectation problem.

Harley Block, CEO and co-founder of brand strategy company IF7, put it bluntly: creator pricing is "out of control."

Nobody knows what anything costs

The reason isn't greed. It's the absence of a reference price.

"Imagine the real estate market where you could never look up what a house on your street sold for," said James Nord, founder of predictive creator-marketing platform Fohr. "It's about transparency and clarity and building more trust into this market." "This is not a functioning market," he said. "Prices never go down… there's no clearinghouse, there's no transparency, so it creates this information asymmetry."

The data exists. It just doesn't circulate. Jamie Gutfreund, founder of creator marketing consultancy Creator Vision, told Digiday data is siloed for a reason — it gives agencies more power. "They [brands] have no historical benchmarking, which means they can't do anything predictive," she said. There is no industry standard; the IAB has published creator economy definitions and taxonomy, but as of yet no pricing guidelines.

And then the invoice grows after the handshake. "You will see some who ask for a portion of the budget. So if the overall paid media budget is $100,000, they'll ask for anywhere from 3% to 10% depending on how wide that paid usage portion is," said Victoria Bachan, svp of creators at talent management company Wasserman.

Why this is a coaching story

Every bullet above describes the coaching market too. No published rates. No benchmark anyone trusts. Fees invented in a DM. Scope bolted on after the contract.

Sellers assume a private, negotiated number protects their margin. What it actually does is remove the buyer's ability to feel good about saying yes. With no comparable, the buyer's brain has nothing to check the number against — so it checks your motives instead.

The fix the creator industry is reaching for is instructive. Agencies and platforms including Fohr, Billion Dollar Boy and AI-powered assistant Nutcake are pushing pricing transparency, with calculators built on thousands of previous deals.

The smaller version of that for a coach: publish a structured price. Name what's included, name what isn't, and put the number where the buyer can see it before they talk to you. Iluka Enright, senior influencer manager at Movers+Shakers, said pricing feels like it's reverting to old-school media kits, with usage as the core focus: "One TikTok Reel is this, one Facebook post is this, it was all so broken down."

Broken down beats bespoke. A visible price gives the buyer something the best negotiation in the world can't — the feeling that they weren't the only one who paid it.