Influencer discovery tool pricing for a small agency (2026)

A small agency buying influencer discovery software in November 2026 pays one of four prices: about $59 to $89 a month for a single seat with metered search and a handful of email credits, $117 to $199 for exports with contacts and sponsor data, $229 to $499 for team tiers and unmetered CSV, or a quote-only annual contract from roughly $12,000 a year upward for the enterprise suites. Below $59 the market sells creator-side statistics with no discovery at all, and the free tiers are sales demos: 500 results with no export, 15 credits a month, one channel at a time. For YouTube specifically, no free tier I could find shows which brands sponsored a channel; the cheapest place that does is a $117 plan.

I priced the tools on 3 November 2026 from their own pricing pages where they publish one, with 2x captures of the pages so the numbers in this post have a date and a source, and from review sites where a vendor only quotes by demo. I run a 105,000-subscriber DevOps channel and I build ReplyDial, whose free YouTube channel search, Discover, sits at the bottom of this ladder; I have an interest in the comparison and I have tried to keep it honest by stating what the paid tools do that Discover does not, which is a lot. The prices will drift; the shape of the ladder has not changed in a year.

Tool, 3 November 2026	Cheapest plan with creator search	What that plan gates to a higher tier	Contract
ChannelCrawler (YouTube only)	$59 a month billed yearly ($708 a year), $99 monthly: 2,000 search credits, 50 email credits, 1 user	Sponsorship intelligence and lookalikes from the $117 Power plan; shared workspace and 2+ users from Enterprise at $6,000 a year	Monthly or yearly
Heepsy	69 € a month billed yearly, 89 € monthly: 5,000 results, 100 advanced profiles, 300 outreach emails, export of results	Contact-details export, audience authenticity and quality-score filters from the 149 € Plus plan; free plan is 500 results, 10 advanced profiles, 1 project, no export	Monthly or yearly
Modash	$199 a month billed yearly ($2,388 a year), $299 monthly: 2 team members, 300 opened profiles, 150 creator emails, 100 tracked	800 profiles, 400 emails and 5 seats on the $499 Performance plan; Enterprise from $14,700 a year	Monthly or yearly
HypeAuditor	About $299 a month billed yearly, by review sites; the pricing page shows no numbers	CSV export of discovery results only on the Pro plan at about $499; credits expire at term end	Yearly in most reports
Upfluence	About $478 a month reported on G2; AWS Marketplace lists 12-month plans from $11,940 (1 seat) to $42,600 (25 seats)	Everything is modular; monthly export caps do not roll over	12-month minimum, no self-serve trial
GRIN	$200 a month self-serve Starter, $500 Growth, $1,500 Scale, plus 5 to 20 percent on creator payments; free plan with 1,200 searches a month and a 20 percent fee on wallet deposits	It is a campaign and payments platform; discovery is a module	Monthly; legacy plans $25,000 to $50,000 a year
Favikon	159 € a month billed yearly (199 € monthly), 1 seat, 500 credits; extra seat 69 € a month	One credit pool for profile reveals, enrichment and lookalikes; free plan 15 credits a month	Monthly or yearly
Social Blade	$5 a month billed yearly for statistics	No niche search, no sponsors, no contacts; 30-day history on free	Yearly
ReplyDial Discover	$0 for the search; Agency $79 a month ($708 a year, launch price) for CSV export up to 500 rows, the brand view, YouTube search on demand and bulk paste; Agency Team $249 ($2,388 a year) for 3 accounts	No Instagram or TikTok, no demographics, no fraud scores, no email reveals, no campaign or payment tools	Monthly or yearly, cancel any time, 14-day refund on a first payment

What do you actually get for each price band?

The tiers rhyme across vendors because they are gating the same four things: how many channels you may look at, how many contacts you may take away, whether you may export, and how many people may log in. Here is what each band bought on 3 November.

$59 to $89 a month, one seat, metered. ChannelCrawler's Starter at $59 (yearly) gives 2,000 search credits a month at 0.1 credit per channel summary, so about 20,000 channel rows, and 50 email credits at 1.0 each; sponsorship data is explicitly "not included on Starter". Heepsy's Starter at 69 € gives 5,000 results, 100 advanced profiles and 300 outreach emails, with export of results but not of contact details. Both are real search tools for one person; both run out mid-month on an active campaign, which is the complaint that fills their three-star reviews.

$117 to $199, the tier agencies end up on. ChannelCrawler's Power at $117 (yearly) adds the part a sponsorship buyer needs: which brands sponsor which channels, 25 brand profiles a month, share of voice across 15 brands, sponsored-channel search and lookalikes, still one user. Heepsy's Plus at 149 € adds contact-details export, audience authenticity and quality-score filters, 500 advanced profiles and 100 tracked creators. Modash's Essentials at $199 (yearly) is the first multi-network plan on the ladder: 2 seats, 300 opened profiles, 150 creator emails, 100 tracked creators across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, with demographics. Favikon's Core at 159 € is one seat and 500 credits that profile reveals, enrichment and lookalikes all draw from.

$229 to $499, team tiers. Heepsy's Advanced at 229 € lifts the caps to 100,000 results and 2,000 advanced profiles. Modash's Performance at $499 gives 5 seats, 800 profiles, 400 emails and 250 tracked creators plus payments. HypeAuditor's Basic sits near $299 a month billed yearly according to the review sites, and CSV export of discovery results needs Pro at about $499; the vendor's own pricing page shows no numbers at all. ChannelCrawler's Enterprise is $6,000 a year, $500 a month, for 2+ users, a shared workspace and 40,000 search credits.

Quote-only, annual. Upfluence's AWS Marketplace listing is the one public price I found: $11,940 a year for one seat to $42,600 for 25. Modash Enterprise starts at $14,700 a year. Traackr, Klear (Meltwater), Kolsquare, CreatorIQ, Tagger and Aspire quote by demo; review sites put them between $17,000 and $55,000 a year on annual contracts, with a 60-day written cancellation notice reported at Klear. GRIN's legacy quotes ran $25,000 to $50,000 a year before its 2026 self-serve tiers.

The free tiers. Heepsy: 500 results a month, 10 advanced profiles, 1 project, no export. Favikon: 15 credits a month. GRIN: 1,200 searches a month, 2 live campaigns, 20 percent fee on wallet deposits. HypeAuditor: free tools that answer one channel at a time. Social Blade: statistics with 30 days of history. Collabstr: free browsing of an opted-in marketplace with 10 percent on orders. None of these shows sponsorship history, and none exports; they exist to start a trial.

Which tools lock you in, and what do the one-star reviews say?

Price is the number on the page; the cost is what happens in month seven. I read the Trustpilot, Capterra and G2 pages that would load for me on 3 November (several review pages refused automated fetches, so for those I relied on search snippets and aggregator summaries) and the same five complaints recur across vendors.

1. Charged after cancelling, or cancellation "not received in time". HypeAuditor's Trustpilot score was 2.1 of 5 from 30 reviews, Heepsy's 3.2 from 45, Upfluence's 3.0 from 55, and the one-star reviews on all three describe a charge after a cancellation request. NinjaOutreach, at 1.5 from 68 reviews, has an $1,850 surprise annual charge in its reviews.
2. A 12-month term sold as shorter. Upfluence reviewers on Capterra describe being held to a year; GRIN's legacy plans had auto-renewal complaints; Klear's 60-day notice window catches people who decided in month eleven.
3. Credits that expire. HypeAuditor reviewers report credits vanishing at term end followed by a full-price renewal; Upfluence's export caps do not roll over; Favikon's single credit pool runs out on lookalikes before the month does.
4. Exports without emails. HypeAuditor and Heepsy reviews describe paid exports that arrived with social links and no email addresses, because the plan bought did not include contact export, which is exactly what the tier table above says if you read the small line.
5. One seat per licence. Favikon charges 69 € a month per extra seat, Upfluence about $79 by reports, Kolsquare licenses per user, ChannelCrawler is one user below $6,000 a year; a three-person agency pays for three of most things.

On the forums the complaint is simpler. A small-brand owner on r/InfluencerMarketing in October 2026 wrote that the discovery tools are too expensive and an agency costs more, so they want to start with a tool and do it themselves; a marketer in the same thread had tried Aspire and Upfluence, found the data poor in their industry, and gone back to manual outreach; a brand on r/marketing found the booking platforms "so expensive" they were considering switching. An agency owner's reply in another thread is the one I would frame: most discovery tools pull from similar data, and the hard part is vetting and getting creators to reply, not finding names. The tools are priced as if finding names were the hard part.

Where does a free YouTube search fit, and what is it missing?

Discover is the YouTube-only end of the ladder, and the honest comparison is to say what it does not have before what it does. It has no Instagram or TikTok, no audience demographics (those are only in the creator's YouTube Studio, and the suites that show them are estimating from samples), no fake-follower score, no rate estimates, no email reveals, no outreach inbox, no campaign management, no payments, no white-label reports, and an inventory of hundreds of channels rather than ChannelCrawler's 35 million. If any of those is the job, it is a companion to a paid tool, not a replacement.

What it has, for nothing: a filtered search over an inventory of analyzed YouTube channels by niche, keyword, subscriber range, country and upload pace, with the brands that sponsored each channel on the row, two scores, and whether a business contact is listed; the first 10 rows of every search without an account and the whole list with a free one; and a fallback that searches YouTube when the inventory has nothing for a keyword, twice a day per visitor, with the results stored for everyone. On 3 November the inventory held 602 channels, 13 with a full report and 145 sponsoring brands; a search for Cloud & DevOps channels above 10,000 subscribers returned 16, with Corey Schafer's row showing Brilliant, Skillshare and Linode and my own showing Trigger.dev, Oracle and Teleport. The ladder on the page is three steps: now, a free account, and the Agency plan.

The $79 is new, and the reason is worth a paragraph. ReplyDial's plans were set in September 2026 for a creator product, a comment inbox, and the Creator plan at $12 a month ($99 a year) and Pro at $29 ($249 a year) were priced against what a creator pays for a channel tool. When Discover's agency features were added in October, they went into the Creator plan because that was the plan that existed, so for a few weeks an agency could get the brand view, 10 YouTube searches a day, bulk paste and CSV export for $12, below ChannelCrawler's $59 entry and far below the $117 where sponsor data starts elsewhere. That was not a sustainable agency price, and a $12 creator plan was a hole anyone could walk through. So the agency track launches with this post: Agency at $79 a month ($708 a year) as a launch price that rises for new buyers later, and Agency Team at $249 ($2,388 a year) for three accounts, both month to month with no credits and no seat fees; the creator plans keep the inbox and every sponsor on every Discover row, and lose the agency features. Anyone already subscribed keeps their price. A 14-day refund on a first payment is the guarantee.

Where the two agency prices land on the ladder, from the table above: $79 sits under ChannelCrawler Starter monthly ($99, 2,000 credits, 50 emails, no sponsor data), Heepsy Starter monthly (89 €, no contact export) and Intellifluence's Starter ($99); the complaints at that band are export gating and credit exhaustion, so an Agency plan at $79 that includes CSV export, unmetered inventory search and sponsor history competes on exactly those lines, and the later $99 still would. $249 sits beside Heepsy Advanced (229 € yearly), Favikon Pro (239 € yearly, one seat), Collabstr Pro (about $249) and just under HypeAuditor Basic (about $299 yearly, no CSV) and Modash Essentials monthly ($299); the complaints there are single seats, 300-profile caps, CSV on the next tier and annual-only billing. I am writing this down in public so you can hold the plan against the list.

What does a year cost for three people?

Monthly prices hide the two multipliers that matter to an agency: seats and the annual toggle. Here is the same ladder as a 12-month bill for a three-person team that needs sponsor data and a CSV it can send to a client, using the vendor pages captured on 3 November 2026 and the review-site figures where that is all there is.

Tool and plan	Seats included	12-month cost for 3 people, billed yearly	What is still missing at that price
ChannelCrawler Power	1	3 licences at $1,404 each: $4,212; or Enterprise at $6,000 for 2+ users and a shared workspace	Instagram and TikTok, demographics
Heepsy Plus	1 per plan as listed	3 at 1,788 € each: 5,364 €	Sponsorship history on YouTube
Modash Essentials	2	$2,388 for 2 seats, a third seat needs Performance at $5,988 for 5	Sponsor history per YouTube channel
HypeAuditor Pro (CSV export)	by quote	about $5,988 by review-site pricing	Public prices
Upfluence	1	$11,940 on the AWS Marketplace listing; more seats by quote	A monthly option
ReplyDial Discover, Agency Team	3 accounts on one plan, no seat fees	$2,388 billed yearly, or $249 a month	Instagram and TikTok, demographics, fraud scores, outreach, payments

The first column of numbers is why small agencies on the forums talk about tool cost before anything else, and why the same people rotate free trials across teammates' email addresses: three seats of a mid-tier tool is a creator fee. The last column is why the cheap end is not a free lunch; the $2,388 buys three accounts of YouTube shortlists with sponsor history and the export, and nothing from the other networks or the private analytics. An agency that bills three networks to its clients needs one of the middle rows, and should pay for it monthly until the second campaign proves the first was not luck.

How should a three-person agency actually budget for this?

Separate the three jobs the suites bundle, price each, and buy only the ones you cannot do with a sheet.

• Sourcing and sponsor history. This is the part that is already a database query once the data exists. For YouTube, Discover does it free and exports it for $79 a month; for Instagram and TikTok there is no free index, and the cheapest real search is $59 to $89 a month for one seat. Budget: $0 to $89 a month.
• Vetting and demographics. Public data covers activity, views against subscribers, sponsors and whether the creator answers viewers; Discover's rows and the channel analyzer report give you that. Audience demographics and watch time come from the creator's Studio screenshot for free, or from a suite's estimate at $199 and up. Budget: $0 if you ask creators; $199 to $299 if you need it in a dashboard.
• Outreach, contracts, payments, reporting. Modash's May 2025 survey found every respondent still ran these in a spreadsheet, about five hours a week, whatever platform they paid for. GRIN, Aspire and Upfluence charge $200 to $2,000 a month to replace the sheet with a workflow and take a cut of creator payments on top. Budget: $0 until the roster is large enough that the sheet breaks, which practitioners put at well over a hundred creators on retainer.

For a first YouTube test with $5,000 to $15,000 in creator fees, the arithmetic says: in-house person, Discover, a spreadsheet, dated Studio screenshots from the creators, and the money in the creators. For an always-on program across three networks with demographics in the client deck, a $199 to $499 multi-network seat earns its keep, and the YouTube shortlist can still come from the free index first. The thing not to do, by every review I read, is sign a 12-month contract in the first month: Modash, Heepsy, Favikon, ChannelCrawler and GRIN all bill monthly at a higher rate, and the premium for a month-to-month plan is cheaper than month seven of a tool you stopped using in month three.

What broke while pricing this?

Three things, all of them useful.

The same vendor had three prices. Heepsy's Starter shows as $49, $69 or $89 depending on which review site you read; Influencity ran from $168 to $1,118 across sources; GRIN's entry plan was $200 on its own page, $399 on one aggregator and $999 on Capterra. The reason is monthly against yearly billing, old pages, and regional pricing: Heepsy served me prices in euros because I captured the page from Sweden, so the table above says 69 € where a US buyer would see dollars. I have quoted the vendor's own page with the billing toggle visible wherever one exists, and marked review-site figures as such; if a number in this post matters to you, open the page and read the toggle.

The pricing pages that are not pricing pages. HypeAuditor's pricing page on 3 November listed plans with no numbers; Traackr, Klear, Kolsquare, CreatorIQ, Tagger and Aspire require a demo. Every figure for them is second-hand and I have said so. A buyer who cannot see a price before a call should assume the price is set per buyer, which is what the renewal complaints at Traackr describe.

My own plan did not fit the ladder. Writing the table made the $12 problem obvious in a way the pricing page had not: an agency feature set under a creator price. It is fixed in the same release as this post, and the fix is in the open above.

What this means for you

• Price the three jobs separately. Sourcing is cheap or free; demographics cost $199 and up; workflow costs $200 to $2,000 and a cut of payments. Buy the middle one only if clients need it in the deck.
• Read the toggle and the small line. "$59 a month" is $708 billed yearly; "export" may mean results without contacts; "1 user" means one. Capture the page the day you buy.
• Never sign an annual contract in the first month. Every tool on the ladder bills monthly at a premium; the premium is cheaper than the year.
• Expect credits to run out and plan the month around them, or pick a tool without credits. Inventory search on Discover is unmetered; only the live YouTube search is capped, because the YouTube API caps it, which I explained in why every YouTube influencer tool limits your searches.
• Keep the shortlist in your own CSV. Whatever you buy, the list and the dated numbers should outlive the subscription; that is also why Discover's export is on its cheapest agency plan.

The questions behind this post, from "do I need a platform or a spreadsheet" to "which tools lock you in for a year", are answered one at a time on the Discover FAQ on tools and pricing. The API calls behind the free index are the same ones in the open-source youtube-comment-tools repository.

This week, with no tool: open the pricing page of whatever you pay for, find the billing toggle, and write down what you actually paid last month against what the plan does that your spreadsheet does not. If the second column is short, you have found the budget for the creators. ReplyDial's Discover searches the YouTube inventory for free, with sponsors on every row, at replydial.com/tools/discover.