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.

In our Q1 2026 testing, median 30-day follower retention was 82% on Instagram, 78% on TikTok, 71% on YouTube, and 69% on Twitter/X. 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. Quality providers sit near the top of each range; the full per-vendor dataset is on our benchmarks page.

Each quarter we buy standardized packages from every listed vendor with our own accounts and track exactly how many followers remain after 30 days. The numbers in this tool's presets come from that testing, not vendor claims. 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 tested retention through the calculator and compare the cost-per-retained-follower figures. 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.'