Most rate guidelines in the creator economy are built on historical data. What creators have already been paid, aggregated across studies with varying participant pools and methodologies, then recycled until they become “standard.” The problem is that those standards often reflect a market that has systematically underpaid creators, particularly underrepresented ones. Repeating them doesn’t fix the gap. Instead, it launders it!

Gage was built from a different starting point. Instead of asking what the market has been willing to pay, it asks what a creator’s work is actually worth, based on their specific metrics, content format, usage rights, exclusivity, and scope. The formula accounts for variables that public guidelines flatten or ignore entirely.

Agencies have their own rate formulas too, but those are built to protect margins and budgets, which is a legitimate business need, but a different one than protecting creators. Gage has no margin to protect. The only number it’s optimizing for is yours.

Gage’s rate formula was built in November 2020 by Brittany Bright and has been updated every year since. It wasn’t reverse-engineered from public rate guidelines, industry studies, or agency data. It was built from the other direction. Brittany spent years inside brand deals, understanding how brands evaluate creator value, what they’re actually willing to pay, and where the gap lies between those two things. The formula reflects that insider perspective.

The baseline inputs, follower tier, engagement rate, content format, usage rights, and exclusivity are informed by industry research, but the modifiers, the fee structure, and the pricing floor logic are proprietary. They were developed independently and have never been publicly shared.

The formula has been applied across real negotiations, including the $3M+ in brand deals that have moved through The Influencer League ecosystem. That application wasn’t data collection. Instead, it was proof of concept. The methodology worked before it was ever encoded into Gage.

When we say underrepresented, we mean creators who face systemic underpayment or under-representation in the creator economy. That includes Black, Brown, and Indigenous creators, women and non-binary creators, LGBTQ+ creators, disabled creators, and others whose identity has been used as a reason to underprice or overlook them.

This isn’t a vague category. The research backs it up. The 2021 ‘Time to Face the Influencer Pay Gap’ study TIL co-authored with MSL documented a 35% pay gap between Black and white influencers for comparable work. That gap doesn’t exist because those creators are less talented or less effective. It exists because they’ve been operating without the same access to pricing information, deal literacy, and negotiation infrastructure that the industry quietly extends to others.

Gage was built with those creators in mind first. Not as an afterthought.

Gage is trained on a proprietary methodology developed by Brittany Bright over a decade of active work in the creator economy, across agency, brand, and education. That includes a rate calculation framework built in 2020 and updated annually, a negotiation curriculum taught to thousands of creators, and years of firsthand pattern recognition from being inside real brand deals at real dollar amounts.

No creator data was used to build or train Gage. The formula was developed independently, informed by industry research and Brittany’s own market observations, then validated through application.

The direction of causality matters: the methodology came first, the outcomes confirmed it.

Most AI tools are only as good as the data they’re trained on. If that data reflects a biased market, and in the creator economy it does, the tool reproduces that bias at scale. Gage was built to break that loop.

The formula Gage runs on was developed independently, from the inside of real brand deals, by someone who spent a decade on both sides of the negotiation table. It wasn’t trained on what creators have historically been paid, and it wasn’t built on public guidelines that encode underpayment as the starting point. Those are two very different foundations.

In 2021, Brittany Bright co-authored research that documented a 35% racial pay gap between Black and white influencers. That research didn’t build Gage, but it confirmed what she had already been watching up close. The pay gap is an information gap. Brands know how valuable creators are. Keeping creators from realizing that value is how the gap stays intact. Gage exists to change that.

That research didn’t build Gage. But it confirmed what was already visible from the inside: that the pay gap is fundamentally an information gap. Brands know how valuable creators are. Keeping creators from realizing that value is how the gap stays intact. Gage exists to close that distance.

The ethics aren’t a feature Brittany added on top. They’re the reason she built this in the first place. Gage doesn’t have a margin to protect or a brand relationship to preserve. The only thing it’s optimizing for is an accurate number that a creator can actually stand behind.