Fifty-three applications, a rate card that undercuts every agency in your market, and recurring commission on everyone you bring with you. Four routes to a real income — costed line by line, with the production help and the platform fees taken out before the number you see.
Your production cost on a finished asset is measured in cents of credits. That is the whole basis of this business: you price on value and speed, never on cost, and you still land under what the agency across town quotes.
PART 02
The ladder members buy
Four rungs. Per-credit cost falls the whole way down, and every rung sits below the cheapest top-up — so subscribing is never the worse deal. Commission is a straight percentage of the price.
Plan
Price / mo
Credits
Seats
You earn (L1)
Your recruits (L2)
Solo
$60
450
1
$15.00 25%
$4.80 8%
Studio
$150
1,200
3
$33.75 22.5%
$11.25 7.5%
Business
$350
3,200
10
$66.50 19%
$21.00 6%
Scale
$700
7,000
25
$105.00 15%
$35.00 5%
Extra seat
$29
—
+1
$7.25 25%
$2.32 8%
Credit top-ups pay a tenth, split 7.5% to you and 2.5% to whoever brought you in.
Top-up
Credits
Price
Per credit
You earn
Studio 100
100
$10
$0.1000
$0.75
Studio 300
300
$25
$0.0833
$1.88
Studio 750
750
$60
$0.0800
$4.50
Studio 2000
2,000
$150
$0.0750
$11.25
Why the rate falls as the plan gets bigger
The percentage drops but the dollar climbs — a Scale account pays you seven times what a Solo account pays, for the same conversation. Moving your target one rung up the ladder is worth more than any rate you could negotiate.
PART 03
Three ways you get paid
They stack. Most agents who reach the upper plans are running all three at once, and the mix is what makes the income survive a slow quarter.
100%
You deliver it
You sell the work and you make it, inside your own ContentPad account. The invoice is yours — all of it. Your only cost is your plan and whatever credits the job burns.
A $3,000 ad sprint costs you a few dollars of credits to produce.
25%
CPD delivers it
You find it and close it, the Blackbook production team makes it. You never touch the file. Useful for overflow, for work outside your skill set, and for the months you would rather sell than sit in Studio.
Anyone you bring onto the platform pays you every month they stay, at the rates in Part 02 — plus a second level on every account held by an agent you recruited. It recurs, so it compounds.
One Business account = $66.50/mo = $798 a year, for one sale.
The distinction that matters: route one is your agency, route three is your annuity. Service work pays this quarter and stops when you stop. Subscription commission is smaller per sale and never stops — it is what turns a good year into a business worth something.
What the work sells for
Standard-tier numbers — the tier you quote first. Essential runs roughly half; Premium two to three times.
Deliverable
Standard price
Essential
Premium
Product / brand image
~$75
$15–40
$120–400
Image pack of 10
~$600
$150–350
$900–2,500
Logo & wordmark
~$900
$150–500
$2,000–5,000
Look-kit (house style)
~$1,200
$300–800
$2,000–5,000
Character + model sheet
~$1,000
$250–600
$1,500–4,000
UGC / faceless short
~$200
$50–120
$300–600
Talking-avatar video
~$600
$150–400
$900–2,000
Motion / video ad
~$2,200
$400–1,200
$3,500–8,000
Animated pilot (~90s)
~$8,000
$2,000–5,000
$12,000–30,000
Ad sprint
~$3,000
$800–2,000
$4,500–10,000
Monthly retainer
~$4,000/mo
$1,000–2,500
$6,000–15,000
The add-ons that raise every quote
Paid-ad usage rights +30–50% · perpetual or broadcast rights +100–150% · rush delivery +25–50% · exclusivity or white-label +50–100%. These are close to pure margin, and clients who need them expect to pay for them. Offer 10–20% off per-project rates in exchange for a monthly retainer lock-in — you trade a little rate for revenue you can forecast.
PART 04
Four plans, costed honestly
Every figure below is what you keep after your ContentPad plan, your credit top-ups and the people you pay to help produce. Gross billings are shown so you can see the shape of the business, not so you can quote them as income.
PLAN 01
The Operator
Solo. You sell it and you make it.
$75,800you keep · $6,318 / mo
Line
What it takes
Per year
Retainers you deliver
2 clients — $2,500 and $1,500 / mo
$48,000
Projects you deliver
2 ad sprints · 2 launch kits · 8 UGC batches
$18,800
Subscription commission
24 accounts — 16 Solo, 6 Studio, 2 Business
$6,906
Referred work
2 pilots a year, CPD delivers, you keep 25%
$4,000
Credit-pack commission
Roughly a third of your book tops up monthly
$389
Your ContentPad plan
Studio — $150 / mo
($1,800)
Credit top-ups
~$40 / mo beyond the allowance
($480)
You keep
gross billings $78,095
$75,815
The shape: two retainers are the whole floor. Land those and the rest is upside. Twenty-four referred accounts is roughly two a month for a year — people you already know, invited from your contacts book. No staff, no overhead, no one to pay but yourself.
The shift: this is the first plan where you stop being the bottleneck. One contractor doing production frees you to sell, and selling is what moves you up. Note the override line is small — $616 — because it is one agent's first year. It is the line that grows fastest.
PLAN 03
The Agency
A three-person shop, and you recruit as well as sell.
The unlock: $37,440 a year now arrives from commission and overrides before you sell anything — that is a salary's worth of floor under a business that still has its best month ahead of it. This is the rung where recruiting stops being a side activity and starts being the highest-paid hour of your week.
PLAN 04
The Regional
A real agency — team of five to eight, your own recruits under you.
The reality: $76,000 a year is now recurring commission and override — it covers your entire team's tooling and most of your overhead before a single invoice goes out. Note what did not change: the rate card. You got here on volume, a bigger team and a deeper book, not by charging more.
Read the assumptions, not just the totals
Every plan assumes about a third of your referred book buys a credit top-up in a given month, retainers hold for the full year, and contractors are paid as a share of service revenue rather than a salary. Change any of those and the number moves. The model is deliberately conservative in one place and generous in another: it assumes no churn on the subscription book, and it assumes you are paying for production help out of your own margin rather than marking it up.
PART 05
How the money actually reaches you
Worth knowing before you count on it.
Your invoices are yours. Service work you sell and deliver is billed by you, to your client, on your terms. ContentPad is not in that transaction — Deal Room writes the proposal and the contract, and the money goes where you tell it to.
Commission is attributed at checkout. When someone signs up through your invite code, your waitlist link or your contacts-book invitation, they are tagged to you. Every renewal writes a fresh commission row — it recurs for as long as they stay.
You need a Stripe Connect account to receive it. Finish Stripe's onboarding once, from Plans & Bank. Until it is done, commission accrues but cannot be sent.
Payout is a button, not a schedule. Commission sits as pending until you press Request Payout in the Bank. Minimum $1.00. There is no automatic monthly transfer — it moves when you ask for it.
Referred fulfilment is settled by CPD. Work you hand to the Blackbook production team is invoiced by CPD; your 25% is paid out on collection, through the same Connect account.
An honest word on timing
The economics here support a full-time career. They do not support a fast one. Ten referred accounts is about $290 a month — real, and nowhere near enough to live on. The first twenty-five are the hard part, and everyone who quits, quits there. What carries you through it is service work, which pays this month; what makes the fifth year worth more than the first is the book, which never stops paying. Build both from day one.
Start where you are.
You do not need a team, a client list or a studio. You need one account, one first client, and the willingness to invite the people you already know. Everything else on this page is what happens after that.