Why Pitchlo charges brands to contact creators (and why there's no free trial)

Every marketplace has to decide who pays, and when. Get it wrong and one side quietly rots while the other wonders why the quality dropped.

Here's how we've set it up on Pitchlo, and the thinking behind each call. If you're a brand deciding whether to pay us, you deserve to know exactly what you're buying and why the price sits where it does.

What's free

Posting a UGC job costs nothing. You write the brief, set your budget, and it's live straight away.

Receiving applications costs nothing either. Whether five creators apply or a hundred, you see all of them — their name, their pitch, the niches they work in, their audience size, and the work they've done before. Nothing's blurred, nothing's capped.

And reviewing them costs nothing. You can pass on anyone, at any volume, without paying us a penny.

What costs money

Reaching out. Creator emails, social handles, and the "Interested" button that puts you directly in touch are part of Brand Pro at $69 a month, cancel any time.

That's the whole model. Free to post, free to receive, free to review. You pay when you want to talk to someone.

Why that line, and not somewhere else

We could've charged per job post. Most job boards do. We didn't, because charging to post punishes the brand who isn't sure yet whether this will work — and a marketplace with fewer jobs is worse for creators, which makes it worse for brands, which makes it worse for us. Job supply is the thing we most want, so we made it free.

We could've taken a percentage of every deal. Some platforms do, usually 10–20%. But that means sitting in the middle of your payments, holding money in escrow, and taking a cut of a relationship you built. It also means we'd have a reason to keep you inside our system instead of getting you hired and out of the way. We'd rather charge a flat fee and let you deal with the creator directly, on your terms, with no cut taken.

So the fee sits at contact. It's the moment you stop looking and start hiring — and it's the moment our work has actually paid off for you.

What the fee actually pays for

The visible part is distribution. When you post a job, it doesn't sit on a page hoping to be found. It's emailed straight to creators whose niche matches your brief, in waves across your first week. It's pinned near the top of the creator job board while it's fresh. It goes into the daily digest creators open over their morning coffee.

That's why brand-posted jobs here tend to get their first application within hours, not days.

The less visible part is everything that keeps the pool worth fishing in: creators paying to be here, spam listings gone, profiles that show real work rather than a follower count and a hope.

The part most brands don't think about until it bites them

Here's the failure mode of a completely free marketplace. It's worth understanding, because it explains our pricing better than anything else.

When contacting creators is free, some brands post a job, collect fifty applications, and disappear. Not out of malice — they get busy, the campaign slips, someone leaves. The creators who applied never hear a thing.

Do that enough times and creators learn. They stop writing tailored pitches. They stop applying to brands they don't recognise. The best ones — the ones with real portfolios and real options — go somewhere their time is respected. What's left is a big pool of low-effort applications, which is exactly what you don't want.

A paid contact step breaks that cycle. Brands who've paid respond, because they've made a decision. Creators who know they'll hear back keep showing up properly. Everyone's experience gets better — including yours, if you were always going to do the right thing anyway.

You're not just paying for access. You're paying for the fact that the creators applying to you still bother to try.

Why we don't offer a free trial

Free trials sound generous. In a two-sided marketplace they're usually a mistake, and here's why.

A free trial invites exactly the behaviour we just described — sign up, grab the contact details, disappear. It attracts people who want to look, not people who want to hire. And every one of them costs a creator an unanswered application.

Trials also work against you. The business model of a free trial is quietly hoping you forget to cancel. Sign up, get distracted, get charged for something you'd decided against. We don't want that to be how we make money.

So instead of a trial, we do what a trial is supposed to do, only better: cancel any time, and 30 days money-back, no questions asked. If Pitchlo doesn't work for your brand, email hello@pitchlo.com and we'll refund you in full. You won't need to explain, you won't get a retention call, and we won't make it hard.

A trial gives you seven days and hopes you're forgetful. This gives you a month and a straightforward way out. We think that's the better offer — and it means the brands who stay are the ones who found it genuinely useful.

Cancel when you're done hiring

Most brands don't hire all year round. You run a campaign, you find your creators, you're done for a while.

That's why Brand Pro is monthly. Subscribe when you're hiring, cancel when you've hired, come back when you need more. No annual lock-in, no cancellation fee. Plenty of brands use us for a month, get their creators, and vanish for a quarter — that's a completely normal way to use Pitchlo, and it's what we built it for.

The short version

• Posting jobs: free, always.
• Receiving and reviewing every application: free, always.
• Contacting creators: $69/month.
• No free trial. Instead: cancel any time, 30 days money-back.

If you've got questions about any of this, email hello@pitchlo.com. A person will answer.