Stop saying "send me your rates"

"Send me your rates."

If you are a brand and that is your whole first email, here is what you actually asked: price a job I have not described, with your own money.

A rate for what? One Reel is a job. One Reel plus your team running it as paid ads for a quarter is a different job that can easily cost double. Add category exclusivity and it is a different job again. A $900 deliverable and a $9,000 package read identically inside "send me your rates." You asked the creator to roll dice, and whatever they roll, you learned nothing about fit.

And creators: stop answering it. I mean the literal behavior of replying with a number, today, before a scope exists.

The moment you say "$1,200," you have anchored the whole negotiation on a guess. Then the brief lands: three concepts for approval, two rounds of revisions, whitelisting for ninety days, and please avoid these six competitor brands until October. All of it now has to be crowbarred into your own $1,200, because negotiating up from your own number is the worst position in commerce. The brand never even had to play hardball. You did it to yourself, for free.

Any number you send without a scope is wrong. Too low, you gave money away. Too high with zero context, you got filtered out by someone who was never going to explain the budget. There is no correct guess. That is the trap built into the question.

Here is the reply. Copy it:

Happy to put a real number on this. Four quick questions: which platform, and how many pieces? Will any of it run as paid ads, and for how long? Any exclusivity? What's the timeline? Send the scope and you'll have an exact quote within a day.

It takes twelve seconds to send. It reads as competence, not evasion. A brand with a real budget answers it easily, and a brand that ghosts a scope question was going to be a nightmare at invoice time anyway. Consider the discovery fee waived.

Now, fairness, briefly. Sometimes "send me your rates" is just triage: someone with two hundred outreach emails to get through needs a first-pass filter, and that is a legitimate way to work a longlist. Fine. Send the rate card, with ranges, and one load-bearing line at the bottom: "Assumes organic posting only. Paid usage, exclusivity, and rush timelines quoted per brief." A floor with conditions attached cannot be used against you. A bare number can.

But brands, hear this. The scope costs you four sentences, and it signals you are serious. Every good creator you email reads "send me your rates" as "we haven't thought about this yet." The ones with options quietly move you to the bottom of the pile.

There is no such thing as "your rates." There is only a rate for a job.

The first side to name a number without a scope loses. Make sure it isn't you.