GRIN Pricing 2026 From $0 to $1,500 a Month Plus Wallet Fees

GRIN publishes its prices, which puts it in a small minority of influencer marketing platforms. Checked at source on 20 October 2026, there are five plans: Free at $0, Starter at $200 a month, Growth at $500, Scale at $1,500 and a custom Enterprise plan. On top of the subscription, every plan charges a management fee when you fund the creator wallet: 20% on Free, 10% on Starter, 7% on Growth, 5% on Scale and a custom rate on Enterprise. The plans are limited by creator searches and gifts per month, not by AI credits. Everything below Enterprise is self-serve and month to month with no required sales call, and every new account gets a free 30-day trial of Starter, which then bills $200 a month automatically unless you switch plans.

If you searched for this because a comparison article told you GRIN costs $999 or $1,799 a month, or that its top plan is $1,000 metered by AI credits, that article is out of date. All of those numbers were real at some point, none is current, and one of them is still sitting on a competitor's own comparison table. The rest of this page is what the pricing page actually says today, what the wallet fee adds, and at what creator spend each paid plan starts to pay for itself.

How much does GRIN cost?

Five plans, four of them with a published monthly price, all on grin.co/pricing without a form in front of them.

Plan	Price	Fee on wallet deposits	Creator searches a month	Gifts a month
Free	$0	20%	1,200	Not listed
Starter	$200/mo (30-day free trial)	10%	12,000	100
Growth	$500/mo	7%	36,000	300
Scale	$1,500/mo	5%	120,000	1,000
Enterprise	Custom (talk to sales)	Custom	Custom	Custom

The creator marketplace is included on every plan. Exporting creator lists and contact emails is not available on Free and is included from Starter up, which on its own is a reason many brands will not stay on Free for long.

The lineup changed again. As of 20 October 2026 the plans are no longer metered by Gia AI credits, Scale costs $1,500 rather than $1,000, an Enterprise plan sits above it, and every plan carries a fee on wallet deposits. Any roundup still quoting $1,000 for Scale, or describing GRIN plans as credit bundles, is out of date.

The wallet fee is the part to read twice. When you fund the wallet, the deposit goes in at full value and the fee is charged on top. GRIN's own example: on Starter, a $1,000 deposit puts $1,000 in the wallet plus a $100 fee. So the real monthly cost of GRIN is the subscription plus a percentage of whatever you pay creators through it.

That changes how you budget. Most platforms in this category charge by seat or by creator capacity, so cost tracks headcount. GRIN's cost tracks two other things: how much searching and gifting you do, which sets the plan you need, and how much you pay creators through the wallet, which sets the fee. At low creator spend the subscription dominates the bill. At high creator spend the fee does.

Does GRIN have a free plan?

Yes, and it now comes with a trial as well. Free is a permanent tier at $0, and separately every new account gets a free 30-day trial of Starter, so you can test the paid tier before deciding whether to pay for it. Watch the end of that trial: billing then starts automatically at $200 a month unless you switch plans.

Free gives you 1,200 creator searches a month and the creator marketplace, but no export of creator lists or contact emails, and it carries the highest wallet fee of any plan at 20%. It is a reasonable way to look around and an expensive way to pay creators.

This matters more than it looks, because it keeps changing. GRIN spent most of 2026 restructuring. In January it launched self-serve for the first time with a 30-day trial and tiers at $399, $699, $1,149 and $1,799. Around July it re-priced again: per-creator tiers gave way to credit bundles, a permanent free tier arrived, and the entry price fell from $399 to $200. In early October the top plan was Scale at $1,000, metered by credits. By 20 October 2026 the credits were gone, Scale was $1,500, an Enterprise plan was listed and every plan carried a fee on wallet deposits. Anything written before the most recent change describes a product that no longer exists, which is why the aggregator listings are such a mess.

How does the GRIN wallet work?

The wallet is where the money you pay creators sits. Paid partnership and affiliate campaigns need at least $250 in the wallet before they run, while gifting-only campaigns need no deposit at all. Creator fees are held in escrow and paid out through Stripe, and GRIN says it takes nothing from creator earnings, so the fee lands on the brand rather than on the creator.

The fee you pay on each deposit depends on your plan:

• Free. 20% on top of each deposit.
• Starter. 10%.
• Growth. 7%.
• Scale. 5%.
• Enterprise. Custom.

The practical consequence is that two brands on the same $500 plan can see very different bills. A gifting-heavy program that rarely funds the wallet pays little beyond the subscription. A paid partnership program that sends serious money to creators every month can pay more in fees than in subscription.

One detail to plan around: the search and gift allowances are monthly, so a seasonal brand either sizes the plan for its busiest month or moves between plans as the season changes, which month-to-month billing allows.

Will GRIN send me a surprise bill?

Less likely than with metered software, because the variable part is charged when you act. The fee is added at the moment you fund the wallet, so you see it before the money moves rather than on an invoice at the end of the month. The two places a bill can still surprise you are the end of the Starter trial, which rolls into $200 a month automatically unless you switch, and the fee itself, if you budget creator spend without adding 5% to 20% on top.

If your finance team budgets creator payments as a separate line, the GRIN fee belongs on that line, not on the software line. That is the sentence to show them.

When does a paid GRIN plan beat the free plan

On fees alone, the answer is one line of arithmetic per plan, and GRIN's own page states the first one: Starter costs less than Free once you fund about $2,000 a month for creators.

• Free vs Starter. Free costs 20% of deposits. Starter costs $200 plus 10%. The two are equal at $2,000 a month of deposits, where both come to $400. Above that, Starter is cheaper.
• Starter vs Growth. Growth costs $500 plus 7%, so it is $300 more in subscription and 3 points less in fee. It beats Starter above $10,000 a month of deposits ($300 divided by 0.03).
• Growth vs Scale. Scale costs $1,500 plus 5%, so it is $1,000 more in subscription and 2 points less in fee. It beats Growth above $50,000 a month of deposits ($1,000 divided by 0.02).

A worked example. A brand funding $5,000 a month for creators pays $1,000 in fees on Free. On Starter it pays $700 ($200 plus a $500 fee). On Growth it pays $850 ($500 plus a $350 fee). Starter is the cheapest of the three at that spend, and Growth only earns its place if the brand needs its 36,000 searches or 300 gifts a month.

Two caveats. This counts fees only, so a brand that runs out of searches or gifts on Starter may need Growth before the fee math says so. And gifting-only campaigns need no wallet deposit, so for a pure gifting program the gift allowance matters more than the fee rate.

What is GRIN Classic and do I need it?

GRIN Classic is the older hands-on management workspace. On the 5 October 2026 version of the pricing page it appeared as a migration source, with free migration from GRIN Classic offered alongside migration from a CSV or a competitor.

Earlier versions of the page listed Classic allowances and active-creator caps per tier, and later credit bundles. The 20 October 2026 version ties the plans to neither, so the tiers now differ by creator searches, gifts and the wallet fee. The step from $500 to $1,500 buys you 120,000 searches a month instead of 36,000, 1,000 gifts instead of 300, and a 5% fee instead of 7%, which only pays for itself at high creator spend.

Worth noting what the page does not meter: the limits GRIN prints per plan are searches and gifts, and the variable part of the bill is the wallet fee, so creator spend is what moves the total.

Does GRIN require a contract or a sales call?

Neither, below Enterprise. Free, Starter, Growth and Scale are self-serve and month to month, with no required sales call. Only Enterprise, which has custom pricing and a custom fee, goes through sales. The one date to remember is the end of the Starter trial, which rolls into paid billing at $200 a month automatically, so switch plans before day 30 if Starter is not the plan you want.

Set that against the rest of the category and it is a genuine differentiator rather than a checkbox. Upfluence's own FAQ states a 12-month minimum contract. Traackr and CreatorIQ both quote after a form. Aspire has no pricing page at all, which is the main practical difference our GRIN vs Aspire comparison turns on. If self-serve evaluation is how your team buys software, the number of vendors here that will actually let you is small, and we compare them side by side on our best influencer marketing platforms roundup.

Do I need to be on Shopify to use GRIN?

No. Shopify is a one-click connection, and for any other stack GRIN provides a tracking SDK and signed order webhooks. The SDK is available on every plan including Free, so you can confirm the integration works before paying anything. GRIN is upfront that this is developer work, while noting that buying GRIN still needs no sales call.

On the payment side, GRIN now sits closer to the marketplace model than it used to. It takes nothing from creator earnings, but it charges the brand a fee on every wallet deposit, from 20 percent on Free down to 5 percent on Scale, so a percentage of what you spend on creators goes to the platform. For comparison, Influee charges a flat 10 percent marketplace fee on top of its subscription, and JoinBrands runs 15 percent on its free tier down to 8 percent on its top plan. GRIN's Starter matches Influee at 10 percent, and its Scale rate is lower than either.

How does GRIN pricing compare to other platforms?

Here is what the category actually publishes, GRIN checked at source on 20 October 2026 and the others in August 2026. The blank rows are the point: most of this market does not print a price.

Platform	Published entry price	Contract	Free option
MicroInfluencers	$49/mo (then $149, $399), plus a small marketplace fee on creator payouts	Monthly	No
GRIN	$0 free, then $200, $500 or $1,500/mo, plus a 20% to 5% fee on wallet deposits	Month-to-month	Permanent free tier, plus a 30-day Starter trial
JoinBrands	Free at a 15% fee, then $99 to $499/mo	Monthly	Yes, with a fee
Influee	$229 to $999/mo plus a 10% marketplace fee	Monthly	No trial
Modash	$299/mo monthly, or $2,388/yr	Monthly or annual	14-day trial, no card
Influencity	$318/mo billed yearly ($3,816/yr)	Annual	7-day trial, no card
Upfluence	Not published	12-month minimum, per its own FAQ	Trial configured after a call
HypeAuditor	Not published	Quoted	Free entry tier and free public tools
Aspire	Not published (no pricing page exists)	Quoted	No
Traackr	Not published	Typically annual	No
CreatorIQ	Not published (Vendr median $39,250/yr)	Annual	No

Read down the second column and GRIN looks less like the expensive option and more like the transparent one. Its free tier undercuts every paid entry point in the table, and its $200 Starter sits below Modash and Influencity while including workflow those two do not. The fee is where the gap narrows: like JoinBrands and Influee, GRIN takes a percentage of what you fund for creators, so compare total cost at your own creator spend, not just the subscription line.

The catch is scope. GRIN is a full creator marketing platform built around ecommerce brands, with 700K+ creators claimed and logos including SKIMS, ColourPop, Vera Bradley, IPSY, G FUEL, ILIA and ASRV. If what you need is a discovery database, you are paying for a lot of workflow you will not open. We break that trade-off down further in our GRIN vs Modash comparison and on the GRIN alternative page.

Why do comparison sites list GRIN at $999 or $1,799?

Because they have not checked since the re-pricing, and in this category almost nobody re-checks.

Capterra, at the time of writing, lists GRIN at $999 a month with "no free trial" and "no free version." All three of those are wrong against GRIN's own page. Stack Influence's own comparison table charts GRIN at $1,799, which was GRIN's top tier before July 2026. When a vendor's competitor is quoting its pre-repricing figure and a major directory is quoting a third number, treat every unsourced price you read in this niche as a claim rather than a fact.

The newest version of the mistake is harder to spot. Reviews written in early October 2026, including the earlier version of this page, quoted Scale at $1,000 and described every plan as metered by Gia AI credits. As of 20 October 2026 both are wrong: Scale is $1,500, the plan limits are creator searches and gifts, and the cost that grows with your program is the fee on wallet deposits. Every review still quoting $1,000 for Scale, or credit metering, is now out of date.

The practical rule: open the vendor's pricing URL yourself before you budget. It takes thirty seconds and it is the only source that is ever current. The same discipline applies when you are checking a creator rather than a vendor, which is the whole argument for a structured influencer vetting process instead of trusting a profile at face value.

Is GRIN worth it for a small brand?

Run the arithmetic against the alternative, because the alternative is usually a person.

US salary data for an in-house influencer marketing manager in mid-2026 spans a wide band: ZipRecruiter puts the average at $83,488, VelvetJobs at $98,900, Salary.com at $115,883 and Glassdoor at $120,718. Even at the bottom of that range you are looking at roughly $7,000 a month before benefits. Agencies are not cheaper in the abstract either: retainers commonly land between $3,000 and $20,000 a month, plus a 15 to 25 percent markup on the creator fees themselves.

Against those numbers, $200 or $500 a month for software, plus the wallet fee on what you pay creators, is not the expensive line in the budget. The expensive line is whoever operates it, whether you screen and rank candidates for the role and put someone in-house, or absorb the work into an existing marketer's week. Software cost is rarely what decides this channel. Operator time is.

Where GRIN genuinely may not fit is the small brand running a handful of micro-creators a month. The platform is built for depth: gifting logistics, affiliate programs, content libraries, multi-program reporting. If your program is fifteen creators in the 1k to 100k band and what you need is matching, briefing, approving and paying, that is a different and much narrower product, which is the gap we built our own influencer marketing platform to fill at $49 a month.

Start on GRIN's 30-day Starter trial before you decide. It lets you test searches, exports and the marketplace on your actual program at no cost. Set a reminder, because on day 30 it starts billing $200 a month unless you switch, and the free tier is there afterward if you are not ready to pay. That is a better evaluation than any pricing article, including this one. It is also the clearest contrast in the category with the vendors that publish nothing at all: Aspire's pricing page 404s and its /plans URL redirects to a demo request, so the only way to learn the number is a call.

All GRIN figures on this page were read directly from grin.co/pricing on 20 October 2026. Competitor prices were checked at each vendor's own site in August 2026. Pricing in this category changes several times a year, so verify before you sign.