No success tax

Creator marketing has a quiet tax baked into how a lot of vendors get paid. If your program works they make more, and if your creators sell more they take a cut of that, which means the better you get at this, the more you hand over for the same software. You did the hard part and they billed you for the outcome.

We decided not to build that company.

What a success tax is

A success tax is any pricing mechanism where your bill goes up because you got better at creator marketing, not because the software did more work.

A percentage of the revenue your creators generate is the cleanest example, and the arithmetic is worth doing out loud. A program driving $2M a year through creators hands over $100,000 at a 5% cut. Get twice as good next year and that becomes $200,000, for software that did not change in any way you asked it to. The only variable that moved was you.

That cut is also rarely the whole bill. It usually sits on top of a monthly subscription you are already paying, so the base stays where it is and the percentage is the part that grows with you.

Per-creator pricing runs a softer version of the same play, billing you for the size of your roster rather than the amount of work you actually asked for. Sign 200 creators, do nothing with them, and the invoice still goes up.

It is a headcount meter wearing a usage meter’s clothes, and like a take rate it charges you for a condition you happen to be in rather than for anything that got done on your behalf.

What we charge for instead

We charge for the work.

The prices are on the pricing page and they start at free. Every plan carries a bundle of credits, and a credit gets spent when Gia actually does something for you: vetting a creator and pulling their track record before you spend a dollar on them, running recruitment that brings matching creators in while you are doing something else, sending the outreach, building the report you asked for. Logging in and looking around your own data costs nothing, because looking is not work. Overage runs under a monthly cap you set, so the ceiling stays yours to pick.

What that adds up to:

• Not per seat. Bring your whole team.
• Not per creator. Your roster is not a meter.
• No take rate. Affiliate links, discount codes, GMV tracked through GRIN. No percentage, no transaction fee.

Your creators’ revenue is not our upside.

Our CEO, Ryan Debenham, wrote the line before I did, in The Foundation Nobody Built: “We should only charge you for what we’re good at, not what you’re good at. We earn by delivering real work, not by taxing outcomes you create.”

He was describing a constraint we build pricing inside of, not writing a tagline.

Three things that have to be true for that to mean anything

You can see the price without a sales call. The plans are published and you can start on one today. Talk to us if you want a custom arrangement, plenty of teams do, but that should be a door you choose to walk through rather than the only one in the building. When the only way to learn what something costs is a calendar invite, your time is paying for what the pricing page should have told you.

You are not locked in before you know it works. Getting started means month to month, with no minimum commitment and no year-long term to sign. If a longer arrangement ever makes sense for your team, that should be a thing you choose because the product earned it, never the toll you pay at the door.

Your success is not our upside share. No percentage of the revenue your creators generate.

To be precise, because the third one is where people push back: I am not saying every fee in software is wrong. Ask for more work and you buy more work, and the bill goes up accordingly, which is just a meter doing its job. A cut of your creator-driven revenue is a different category entirely, because it scales with how well you performed rather than with anything you asked us to do.

Why this matters now

This year we decided to publish our prices, and most of this category still has not. If you want to know what a lot of these platforms charge for their creator product, you book a call and wait. We put the numbers on a page and let anyone open an account, which is still the exception here rather than the norm.

The second reason is bigger than creator marketing. Many AI products are moving toward outcome-based pricing right now: charge for results, take a percentage of whatever the agent produced. Strip off the language and that is the same deal the take-rate platforms have been running in our category for years, arriving now with better PR. We are shipping an agent and going the other way on purpose. When the software really does the work, charging for the work makes more sense rather than less, because the work is what costs us money to run. A take rate assumes your success and our costs move together, and they do not.

Better tooling ought to make the operational side cheaper rather than collect a royalty on the relationships and the revenue you built yourself.

If your current stack takes a cut every time your creators perform, ask who is getting paid for whose work.

See the pricing, or start free.