What an influencer research virtual assistant costs, versus a sourcing tool

Published rates for influencer-research VA work run $10 to $15 an hour or $1,600 a month at one agency, and no figure at all at another. Converted, freelancers have taken this work at roughly a dollar a creator and tools at $1.99 an email, derived from Modash's $299 a month over its published 150-email quota. Nobody publishes that conversion. Here it is, on both sides.

The two halves of this market are priced in units that never meet. VA agency pages price labour by the hour or by the month, and name the software without pricing it. Software roundups price the software by the seat, and never price the labour. Dollars per creator is the only unit both sides convert into.

One agency publishes three prices for the same job

Stealth Agents sells this role on two pages. The first says a VA "handles influencer research, contact management, outreach sequences, and performance tracking at $10/hr through Stealth Agents", and again that "a full-time dedicated VA through Stealth Agents at $10/hr provides the coordination capacity needed at a fraction of the cost". The footer of that same page sells something else: "Save 78% compared to full-time hires. Get a dedicated, pre-vetted assistant starting at $15/hr."

The second page prices the identical role at "$1,600/month (full-time, dedicated)" and carries the same "$15/hr" button. Its cost table compares a different job: an "In-House Social Media Manager" at "$55,000/year" base, totalled as "$78,000/year" against "$19,200/year" for their VA. The salary for the job the page is actually selling sits back on the first page, in a paragraph recommending the $10/hr VA instead: "A full-time influencer coordinator in the US earns $45,000 to $60,000 per year, plus benefits."

Derived rather than quoted: $19,200 a year across 2,080 working hours is about $9.23 an hour, which sits neatly with the $10/hr in the body and with $1,600 a month. The $15/hr in the button is the outlier, and it cannot be reconciled with $1,600 a month at any number of hours — because neither page ever states the hours.

That is the flaw worth carrying into every quote you collect. A monthly VA price with no hours attached is not a price. It is a budget.

A virtual assistant for influencer outreach is quoted in four incompatible units

Every figure below was read on the vendor's own page on 14 August 2026.

Three things in that table decide what a quote is worth.

The headline rate is usually the bulk rate. MyRemoteVA's "As low as $4/hr" is true at five full-time VAs and nowhere else; one full-time person is $5.00/hr and $800 a month. Their small hourly bundles run the other way — "05 Hrs($9.0/hr) $45 / 10 Hrs($8.5/hr) $85 / 20 Hrs($8.0/hr) $160 / 40 Hrs($7.5/hr) $300" — so a first, cautious 5-hour trial costs more than double the headline.

Wishup's monthly prices carry a 4h/8h selector, and the price did not change when it was toggled. Take "$1999/month" as a monthly figure with the hours unknown, and ask before you sign.

The published spread runs $440 a month for a dedicated part-time VA to $5,400 for a US-based one — a factor of twelve, across pages that mostly do not say what hours you are buying. Only VantaStaff and MyRemoteVA state hours at all. Everything else on that list has to be converted by asking.

Software publishes a price per seat, and one vendor publishes the divisor

The tools have the opposite problem. The price is easy to find and the unit is still wrong, because a seat is not a creator.

Modash is the one that can be converted without asking anybody, because it publishes both halves: $299 a month and a 150-email quota. Derived, and labelled as derived — that is $1.99 per email month-to-month, or $1.33 if you pay annually. Nobody else on that list divides.

influencers.club's pricing card and its own FAQ name different starting prices, which is worth knowing before you quote a competitor's number in a board deck. We took that apart, alongside every published price in the category, in a post about YouTube business emails.

The billing docs promise less than the pricing pages imply

This is the part that never appears in a roundup, because it lives in developer documentation rather than on a pricing page.

influencers.club's docs state that "Credits are consumed per successful result, not per request". Modash's docs state that "In case of any failed responses, e.g. HTTP status code 500 (Internal Server Error) … you will not incur any charges or consume any credits/limits. These failed requests are considered non-billable events."

Read them closely: both are promises about the request. A call that errors is free. Neither says anything about a call that works perfectly and comes back with nothing useful in it — which is the outcome you actually pay for, over and over, in any niche where a chunk of the creators publish no contact address.

The only page that prices both sides is in rupees, and it never prices a person

A platform vendor published a finding against itself. Qoruz's in-house-versus-platform comparison is the closest published thing to the calculation here: "For low-volume brands (1-4 campaigns annually): In-house management typically costs ₹3.75-7.4 lakhs per campaign / Platform management costs ₹6.75-22.5 lakhs per campaign." It puts "The breakeven point … at approximately 5-7 campaigns annually for most brands", with an "Influencer Marketing Manager ₹6-8 Lakhs Salary for a mid-level specialist", a "Total Annual Cost ₹15-29.6 Lakhs Before influencer payments", and "subscription fees averaging ₹2-7 lakhs monthly".

The workload is the part worth stealing: "Your team spends an average of 15-20 hours per week on influencer discovery and vetting for each campaign."

Put that against a published wage and the whole comparison collapses into one line. Twenty hours a week at MyRemoteVA's stated $5.00/hr full-time rate is $100 a week of discovery — arithmetic combining two sources, quoted by neither. What Qoruz never does is price a VA, price a freelancer, or price a creator, and its figures are in INR against Indian salaries.

What buyers actually paid per creator, and how old each number is

These are public job posts and offers. Read the dates first: the cheapest numbers here are the oldest ones, and treating the column as a current rate card is the fastest way to insult a freelancer.

The $100 posting is the one to look at closely, and its body has since been deleted, so only the title and the replies survive. The winning bidder wrote that "Here is exactly how I plan to source and filter this list for you to ensure 100% compliance with your rules", and then: "Manual Vetting: I will personally click into every single profile to verify".

That sentence is what a dollar a creator buys. Not the finding — the compliance. Somebody sat with a written rule set and opened a hundred profiles against it. The sourcing underneath is the cheap half, and it is the half that has a price on both sides of the market.

Price the job per creator before you buy either side

Five steps, none of which cost anything.

1. Write the rule set you would hand a person. Follower band, niche, platform, what disqualifies a profile. The two-year-old ad above is the model for it: "Payment ONLY for influencers that match the exact niche criteria."
2. Source twenty creators yourself against that rule set, time yourself honestly, and pull the contact for each one.
3. Divide. Your hours times what your hour is worth, over twenty. That is your real cost per creator, and it is the number that makes every quote in the tables above comparable.
4. Ask any agency for the hours in writing. Most of the pages in the first table do not state them, so a monthly figure is not comparable to anything until you have that number.
5. Convert every software quote the same way: monthly price over the number of creators or emails the plan actually includes. Modash publishes that divisor. If a vendor will not give you one, you have a quote and not a price.

Run steps 1 to 3 before talking to anyone. You will know which half of the job took the hours, the finding or the judging, and those two halves have very different markets.

Where we fit

We sell the sourcing half, priced by the result rather than by the hour or the seat. Twelve credits per result. One credit is $0.01 on pay-as-you-go and falls to $0.0066 with volume, so $0.079 to $0.12 per creator, with no monthly fee on pay-as-you-go at all. Monthly plans are $1,499, $3,999 and $8,499 if the volume justifies them.

Against the one competitor figure on this page that can be divided, that is $0.079 to $0.12 per creator versus $1.99 per email on Modash Essentials month-to-month.

The emails are ones creators publish themselves. Lookalike results on TikTok and Instagram carry those addresses inline, either search can be filtered to creators who have one, and YouTube additionally has a dedicated email lookup that returns the business email a channel publishes on its own page. We do not verify any of them, and we say published rather than verified deliberately.

A lookup that finds no email is not charged. That is the promise the billing docs quoted above stop short of: not "you are refunded when our server errors", but "a search that works and comes back without an address costs you nothing".

Exclusion lists are the other thing an hourly arrangement cannot give you. A creator you have already contacted is never returned again, in any later campaign, whoever is running it. That list is normally the thing that leaves with a departing VA.

What this does not do

Read this before you decide, because it is precisely the half the $100 posting was buying.

We do not screen against your written rules. No fit judgement, no reading the last four videos, no compliance check against a brief. That is the manual vetting the bidder described, and it is worth paying a person for.

There is no gender filter at all. If a brief calls for creators of a particular gender, that is a screen a person performs and we do not offer.

Country exists on YouTube and Instagram only. The Instagram brief above asking for creators in "Canada, Australia" is one we can filter for; the same brief on TikTok is not.

No audience-authenticity signal. No fake-follower detection, no engagement scoring, no fraud check. The freelancer above who offers "Engagement checks (not just follower count)" is selling something we do not hold.

Three platforms, no phone numbers, and no claim that an address is still watched.

The answer is not a rate. If you run one list a quarter, a freelancer at somewhere near a dollar a creator is a reasonable buy and no subscription survives the maths — which is the same conclusion Qoruz reached about its own category at one to four campaigns a year. If you are sourcing continuously, buy the finding by the result and keep the person for the judging, which is the part nobody has managed to price by the hour and get right.