Influencer Marketing Without the Agency Overhead
Campaigns run for you, on one invoice that adds nothing on top of the budget you set, with results you can check yourself.
You came here looking for an influencer marketing agency. Hiring one is a reasonable way to run creator campaigns, and for years it was the only way to get them run for you.
How Hypefy Compares to a Traditional Influencer Marketing Agency
The work looks similar from the outside, so the table below sets out where the two models diverge.
Finding creators
Creator pricing
What you pay
Charges added on top of your budget
Speed to launch
Getting to a creator shortlist
Who chooses the creators
Content and revisions
Creator payments
End of campaign reporting
Budget that goes unspent
The agency column describes how these engagements are commonly structured according to published industry pricing guides, and the ranges behind it are set out below. Individual agencies differ, and your own terms may look nothing like this.
How Much Does an Influencer Marketing Agency Cost?
What it costs
- Campaign budget €10,000
- Management fee or retainer +€1,500
- Markup on creator fees +€1,500
- Campaign budget €10,000
- Charges added on top of your budget No
What that spend buys
- about 834,000 reach
- about 50 posts
- about 25 creators
- about 1,084,000 reach
- about 65 posts
- about 33 creators
Campaign budgetAgency total €13,000
Agency figures here are illustrative estimates drawn from publicly published pricing ranges and are yours to adjust. They are not a statement about what any specific agency charges. Hypefy reach, post and creator figures are medians from completed Hypefy campaigns in the selected market, stated per 1,000 of invoiced budget, and are indicative, not a guarantee.
Agencies charge for the work in one of two ways and often both at once.
There’s a monthly retainer that bills whether or not a campaign runs, or a management fee taken as a percentage of what you spend, and on many engagements a markup sits on each creator fee as well, all of it above the money that reaches creators.
Reported ranges vary widely and are not published by any central authority. Pricing depends heavily on region, scope, and how much of the work sits with the agency.
Hypefy is structured the other way around.
There’s no subscription and no retainer, you pay per campaign, and the fee is a percentage of the campaign budget taken out of that budget.
A 10,000 budget is invoiced as 10,000 in the currency you set.
Nothing is charged while you write a brief, run a search or review a creator list, and if creators decline and the budget does not fill, the unspent part comes back to you.
How Hypefy Runs Your Campaign From Start to Finish
- 01
You give us a brief
On a first campaign, a customer success manager works through it with you, so the targeting is right before anything is searched.
- 02
Finding creators
The platform then searches creators across Instagram and TikTok directly, which makes it a live search of the open creator universe instead of a closed database of profiles that have already signed up.
Semantic Selection reads what each creator posts about and weighs that content match well above follower count. The search builds a longlist of up to 200 profiles, narrows it to around 50, and a customer success manager checks that shortlist before it reaches you.
- 03
Who chooses the creators
You review the list and remove anyone you do not want.
- 04
Speed to launch
Offers then go out to the whole approved set at once and the budget fills as creators accept.
- 05
Content and revisions
Creators submit content on the platform, you review it before anything goes live, and the platform logs every revision request with a timestamp, so there is a record of what was agreed and when.
- 06
Creator payments
At the end, Hypefy pays every creator, including creators without a registered business, and sends you a single invoice. The platform generates a report automatically, with reach and impressions, CPM, audience breakdown by age, gender, and city, and which content performed best.
On timing, the search itself takes minutes and a campaign typically goes live within a day of the list being approved. From brief to published content, plan around three weeks, covering the shortlist, outreach, negotiation, production, and approvals. How quickly creators respond to offers is the variable that moves it most.
Do You Still Need an Agency for Influencer Marketing?
Brands hire agencies for good reasons. Someone outside the company owns the work, there is a person to call when a creator goes quiet, and there is guidance from a team that does this every day. If you run a few campaigns a year and nobody internally owns the channel, that is worth paying for.
If you do hire an agency, the questions worth asking are:
- How they source creators
- Whether fees are set from a creator’s asking price or from measured performance
- What the markup on creator fees comes to
- Whether the retainer bills in months when nothing runs
- Who owns the reporting.
An agency that answers those clearly is one worth paying for.
Most of what brands want from that arrangement is execution:
- Creators chosen well
- Fees negotiated
- Content delivered on time
- Results reported clearly
That is what Hypefy does directly, with a customer success manager on the account for the judgment calls.
What you leave behind is the retainer that bills in months when no campaign runs, the management fee, the markup on each creator fee, and the wait while someone puts a list together.
Hiring an agency means paying for a layer of people to do work the platform now does directly, and the cost of that layer is money that could have gone into the campaign instead.
Brands Already Running Campaigns This Way
Argeta, Philips, SONY, PepsiCo, ABOUT YOU, Kaufland, dm, Eucerin, and many others all run influencer campaigns through Hypefy.
Across the platform, over 300 brands and agencies have completed more than 2,000 campaigns since 2022, delivering more than 850 million impressions.
Argeta is the clearest illustration of what the model makes possible. 21 campaigns across 14 European markets, run by one team on one platform, reaching more than 4.6 million people.
On performance, the median engagement rate across 23,844 published feed posts is 3.81% of reach, and TikTok content runs at 5.35%.
Public engagement benchmarks are almost always calculated against follower count, which makes them a different measurement and not comparable with these figures.
Find an Influencer Marketing Agency Alternative by Country
Creator supply, creator pricing and the shape of the local market change from one country to the next, and the same budget buys a different campaign in Zagreb than it does in Munich.
If you know the market you’re running in, start with the Hypefy page for that country.
- Australia
- Belgium
- Canada
- Croatia
- Denmark
- Dubai
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Italy
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Serbia
- Singapore
- South Africa
- Spain
- Sweden
- UAE
- UK
- USA
Industries and platforms
Ready to Skip the Agency and Get Started?
You can have campaigns run for you without hiring an agency, with the fee coming out of your budget instead of sitting on top of it. A 30-minute session gets you a live look at the platform, a brief built around your product, and an estimate of what your budget buys in your market.
Influencer Marketing Agency FAQs
An influencer marketing agency plans the campaign, finds and vets creators, negotiates fees, briefs everyone, reviews content and reports on results.
Most also handle contracts and payments.
The value is that a team outside your company owns the work, and the cost is the fee layer that sits on top of what you pay creators.
There’s no published rate card. Agencies typically charge a monthly retainer, a percentage of creator spend, or both, often with a markup on individual creator fees.
What you pay depends on how many campaigns you run and how much of the work sits with the agency.
Use the calculator above to see the effect on a specific budget, and adjust the ranges to whatever you have been quoted.
It depends on how much you run and who owns it internally.
If you run a few campaigns a year and nobody on your team owns the channel, paying an agency to own it can be worth the fee. If you run regularly, or you want the fee spent on creators instead, a platform that executes the campaign gets you the same output for less.
An agency sells you people who do the work, while a software platform usually sells you access to tools and leaves the work to you.
Hypefy sits between the two. The platform executes the campaign, and a customer success manager stays on the account, so the campaign is run for you without an agency fee structure.
Yes, you can run influencer campaigns without an agency.
Creator search, pricing, outreach, contracts, content approval, payments and reporting all run on the platform, with a customer success manager on the account for the judgment calls.
You keep approval over the creator list and the content.
Hypefy searches Instagram and TikTok directly instead of a database of profiles that have signed up, so a creator doesn’t need a Hypefy account to appear in your results.
Semantic Selection reads what a creator posts about and weighs that content match well above follower count.
You can also seed the search with creators you already work with, and exclude anyone who has run a campaign with a competitor.
Hypefy calculates fees from measured performance on a creator’s recent posts, mainly reach and engagement, instead of the rate they ask for.
Offers go out to a wide set of creators at the same time, and the budget fills as creators accept.
Yes. You see the shortlist before anyone is contacted, and you remove anyone you don’t want.
You can add a specific creator by hand, exclude creators who have worked with a competitor, and upload a list of profiles to keep out of the search entirely.
If creators decline and the campaign doesn’t fill its budget, the unspent amount comes back to you.
You are charged only for the part committed to creators who accepted.
The creator search itself takes minutes.
A full campaign needs anywhere from a few days to two-three weeks from brief to published content, which covers the shortlist, outreach, negotiation, content production and approvals.