GRIN vs Modash: 2026 Pricing Compared

GRIN and Modash both publish their prices, which already puts them ahead of most of this category, but they meter you on completely different things. GRIN meters AI credits: a free tier with 200 monthly credits, then $200, $500, $1,000 and $1,500 a month, with no per-seat pricing and no active-creator limit. Modash meters seats, profile views and tracked creators: $299 a month for Essentials (up to 100 creators, 2 team members) and $599 for Performance (up to 250 creators, 5 team members), dropping to $199 and $499 a month if you prepay a year, with Enterprise from $14,700 a year. Pick GRIN if you want to start free and scale by usage. Pick Modash if you want a very large search index and creator payments built into the plan you buy.

Every figure below was checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 19 August 2026. That check matters more here than in most software comparisons, because GRIN has re-priced twice in the last eight months and a lot of the articles ranking for this question are still quoting a model it abandoned.

How much does GRIN cost?

GRIN publishes five tiers in US dollars and states plainly that there is no required sales call and no card needed on the free plan. The thing to understand before reading the table is that GRIN no longer prices per seat. It meters credits consumed by Gia, its AI agent, and every plan gives Gia a monthly credit bundle to work with.

Two details on that page are worth more than the headline numbers. On the free plan, GRIN says Gia simply pauses billable work once the 200 monthly credits are used, so there is no overage and no surprise invoice. On the paid plans, going over your credits does not move you to a higher tier: Gia keeps running at one flat overage rate that is the same on every paid plan, you set a hard cap yourself, and GRIN states you are never billed a dollar above that cap. If you have been burned by usage-based software before, that hard cap is the sentence to read twice.

The catch with credit metering is that it is genuinely hard to forecast on day one. Credits are consumed by the work Gia does, so two brands paying $500 can get very different amounts of use out of it depending on how much they lean on the AI. The free tier exists partly to solve this, and using it to calibrate before you commit is the obvious move.

How much does Modash cost?

Modash publishes a full price list too, with one detail almost every comparison article gets wrong: the $199 and $499 figures everyone quotes are the annual-prepay rates, not the monthly price. Month to month, Essentials is $299 and Performance is $599. Quote the discounted number as if it were the monthly cost and you understate a Modash subscription by 50 percent, which is a big enough gap to break a budget you have already had approved. The full tier-by-tier breakdown, re-verified at source in August 2026, is in our Modash pricing guide.

Modash meters usage in four separate currencies of its own: team members, opened profiles, unlocked creator emails and tracked creators' content. Essentials gives you 300 opened profiles, 150 unlocked emails and 100 tracked creators. Performance roughly doubles or triples each of those, at 800 opened profiles, 400 unlocked emails and 250 tracked creators. Both published tiers can be started with a 14-day free trial, no credit card, rather than a sales call, and Discover indexes 380M+ profiles.

The line that decides the tier for a lot of brands is creator payments. Paying creators and running affiliate links are included from Performance upward, at 0% fee on the first $10,000 a year across payments and affiliates combined and 5% above that, and Enterprise raises the threshold to $100,000 a year. On Essentials, payment is not part of the plan. So if you want to find creators and pay them inside the same tool, the real Modash entry price is $599 a month, not $299.

GRIN vs Modash: the side by side

Which is cheaper, GRIN or Modash?

At the headline they look close: $200 against $299, or $199 if you prepay Modash for a year. The honest answer is that the comparison only becomes real once you name which job you are buying for, because the two products stop in different places.

If you want discovery plus creator payments in one tool, Modash costs $599 a month and GRIN's comparable configuration starts at $200. If your team has five people who need logins, Modash puts you on Performance regardless of your campaign volume, while GRIN does not charge by seat at all. If you run a heavy AI workflow, GRIN's credits can make a $500 plan behave like a much more expensive one, and Modash's flat allowances become the more predictable bill. There is no universal winner in that list, which is exactly why the headline prices matching is a coincidence rather than a finding.

One more thing worth separating: software cost is not campaign cost. Every figure on this page buys the tool only. Creator fees, product and shipping are separate lines, and on a healthy micro-creator program the creator spend is usually the larger of the two. If you are at the stage of adding another subscription to the stack, it is worth knowing what every tool in that stack already costs you before you compare two monthly numbers in isolation.

Does GRIN have a free plan?

Yes. GRIN offers a permanent free tier at $0 with 200 Gia credits a month, no credit card, and no required sales call. It is aimed at light-touch work: focused sourcing, reporting and a small affiliate motion. This is a recent change and it is the single most common error in articles about GRIN. Until January 2026, GRIN was quote-only. It then launched self-serve tiers with a 30-day trial, and around July 2026 it replaced that trial with the permanent free tier and swapped per-creator pricing for credit bundles. Any article describing a GRIN 30-day trial is describing something that no longer exists.

Does Modash have a free trial?

Yes. Modash puts a "Try for free" button on both published tiers, so you can start without talking to sales. The trial is metered rather than open-ended, so treat it as a data-quality test rather than a campaign. Go in with a shortlist of creators you already believe are a good fit and spend the profile views checking whether Modash agrees with your own read of their audience. That tells you more in an hour than a week of browsing.

Which is better for micro influencers?

Both cover the micro band, and neither is built specifically around it. Modash advertises indexing every public profile above 1,000 followers, which makes it strong for finding nano and micro creators nobody in your category has approached yet. GRIN is oriented toward DTC brands managing a creator roster they already have, with ecommerce workflows around it.

The friction for a micro program is rarely discovery, though. It is that fifteen small creators means fifteen briefs, fifteen approval threads and fifteen payments, and that admin is what stalls micro campaigns far more often than the creator fees do. When you compare these two, weigh the workflow columns above the index size. If the tool hands you a list and stops, you have bought a search engine and kept the hard part. That is the same trap we describe in more detail on our guide to the micro influencer marketing platform category.

What are the alternatives to GRIN and Modash?

If neither fits, the useful question is which constraint is blocking you. If the blocker is price, look at platforms that publish month-to-month pricing rather than annual quotes. If it is research depth, Influencity publishes a single self-serve plan at $318 a month billed yearly and advertises more than 200 million creator profiles, though paying influencers in bulk sits on its Enterprise plan. At the enterprise end, Traackr, CreatorIQ, Aspire and Upfluence all quote custom annual contracts after a demo, and Upfluence states a 12-month minimum on its own pricing page.

We keep per-vendor breakdowns of each of these, including where they beat us, on our GRIN alternative and Modash alternative pages, and the full category is priced out side by side on best influencer marketing platforms. If you are weighing Modash against a quote-only enterprise tool instead, Modash vs Upfluence covers that pairing.

GRIN vs Modash: which should you choose?

Choose GRIN if you want to start at zero cost and prove the channel before paying anything, if your team is larger than five people, or if you already have a creator roster and need workflow around it rather than a bigger search index. The free tier plus the hard spending cap makes it the lower-risk way to start.

Choose Modash if discovery is genuinely your bottleneck, if you want the widest possible net across accounts above 1,000 followers, or if you want creator payments and affiliate tracking inside the same subscription and can sit at the $599 Performance tier to get them. Budget from the month-to-month price unless you are ready to commit to a year.

Choose neither if your program is fifteen micro-creators at a few hundred dollars each and the thing eating your week is briefing, approving and paying them. That is the shape MicroInfluencers is built for: describe your brand, get a ranked shortlist of fake-follower-checked creators from 1,000 followers up, then brief with FTC #ad disclosure built in, approve the content and pay from the same place, on published pricing of $49, $149 and $399 a month with no annual contract, plus a small marketplace fee on creator payouts. Start with the matcher at the top of this page and see the kind of creators it returns for your niche.

Pricing for both vendors verified against grin.co and modash.io on 14 August 2026. This category re-prices often, so open the vendor page before you budget from any comparison table, this one included.