Cost-Per-Retained-Follower Calculator

It's what you actually pay for each bought follower that's still there after 30 days. Advertised pricing counts every follower delivered, but a share drop off when platforms purge low-quality or bot accounts. Dividing your spend by the followers that stick gives the honest unit cost, and it's almost always higher than the sticker price.

Because delivery and retention are different things. A vendor can deliver 500 followers and still leave you with 225 a month later. At $9, that's not $0.018 per follower, it's $0.040 per retained follower, a 122% retention tax. Two vendors with identical sticker prices can have very different real costs.

As a working benchmark, estimated median 30-day follower retention is around 82% on Instagram, 78% on TikTok, 71% on YouTube, and 69% on Twitter/X. Only the Instagram figure is anchored to first-hand testing (our Q1 2026 follower pilot); the other platforms are editorial estimates, scaled by how aggressively each network purges inauthentic accounts. The lower platforms aren't worse vendors — their bot detection is just stricter, so roughly 90% on TikTok is as strong as 97% on Instagram. The full per-vendor dataset, with measured figures labeled, is on our benchmarks page.

We ran a hands-on pilot: we bought standardized packages from five services with our own money and tracked exactly how many followers or likes remained after 30 days (Likes.io, Growthoid, Twicsy, Buzzoid, and one TikTok order from UseViral). Those five are genuine first-hand measurements. This tool's wider platform presets — the median and bargain bands, and the non-Instagram platforms — are editorial estimates extrapolated from that pilot plus public data and vendor-advertised terms, not first-hand tests of every vendor. Our full process is on the methodology page.

No. In our data, price correlates only weakly with retention. The $1–2 tier is often a retention trap, drifting toward 50% by day 30 on repeat purchases. Use cost per retained follower, not price, to compare vendors fairly.

Run each vendor's real package price, quantity, and retention through the calculator and compare the cost-per-retained-follower figures. Use a measured retention rate where we have one (our five pilot services) and the vendor's own advertised figure otherwise. The lowest sticker price rarely wins once retention is priced in: a 95%-retention vendor at a small premium usually beats a 45%-retention 'bargain.'

Of the five services we measured first-hand, the organic-growth tool Growthoid held the most (98% of an Instagram follower order after 30 days), Likes.io kept 97% and Twicsy 95% (on likes), Buzzoid kept 91% of a 500-follower order, and a TikTok order from UseViral held 82% — the lowest of the five. On a 1,000-follower order, 98% vs 82% is the difference between keeping roughly 980 followers and roughly 820. Those five are genuine measurements; every other retention figure in the tool is an editorial estimate, labeled as such.