Buying well
What a fair SMM panel price looks like
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team, 6 min read
What does a fair price mean in this market?
A fair price is the median of what other sellers charge for the same product, where product means the metric, the targeting and the refill window together. That definition matters because the per-1,000 rate on its own describes almost nothing: two rows called Instagram Followers can be several hundred times apart and both be honestly priced, because one is worldwide bot inventory with no remedy and the other is region-filtered supply carrying a 30-day refill.
It follows that the cheapest offer is neither the fair price nor usually the best deal. It is the price of the least durable version of the thing, sold by whoever is willing to sell at the floor, and this market prices durability separately and openly.
What do the main services actually cost right now?
The table below is the live index for 2026-09-10. Every figure is USD per 1,000 units, computed across every offer row mapped to that canonical service, read from panel catalogues over the API rather than from marketing pages.
| Service | Cheapest | Lower quartile | Median | Upper quartile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instagram Followers | $0.01 | $1.87 | $3.13 | $6.31 |
| Instagram Likes | $0.0125 | $0.16 | $0.71 | $3.00 |
| Instagram Video Views | $0.0013 | $0.07 | $0.26 | $1.28 |
| TikTok Followers | $0.23 | $2.08 | $2.99 | $4.91 |
| TikTok Likes | $0.019 | $0.28 | $0.41 | $0.80 |
| TikTok Views | $0.014 | $0.06 | $0.16 | $0.45 |
| YouTube Views | $0.05 | $0.95 | $2.50 | $3.50 |
| YouTube Subscribers | $0.0125 | $5.43 | $20.16 | $30.45 |
| YouTube Likes | $0.66 | $1.56 | $4.36 | $6.41 |
| X (Twitter) Followers | $0.38 | $2.66 | $7.46 | $19.30 |
| Telegram Channel Members | $0.10 | $0.44 | $0.89 | $1.74 |
| Facebook Page Likes | $0.26 | $1.10 | $12.74 | $12.92 |
| Spotify Plays | $0.125 | $0.42 | $0.74 | $1.00 |
| Twitch Followers | $0.068 | $0.20 | $0.38 | $1.23 |
Source: PanelCompare price index, 2026-09-10, computed over 7,754 live offer rows. A service appears only where at least two distinct panels sell it, so the index covered 93 of the 182 catalogue services that day.
One external cross-check exists and is worth reporting. SMMQuest, an independent price aggregator, published a starting price of $0.89 and a typical price of $3.40 per 1,000 Instagram followers across 1,674 panels (smmquest.com, checked 2026-09-11). Its typical figure and the $3.13 median above come from different panel samples by different methods and land within nine per cent of each other, which is the closest thing to corroboration this market offers.
What is the gap between the cheapest and the median offer?
Four things, in roughly descending order of size: country targeting, refill coverage, source quality, and the number of resale hops between the buyer and delivery. None of them is visible in the per-1,000 number, and all of them are visible in the row itself if you read it.
| Variable | What it does to the price | How to see it on the row |
|---|---|---|
| Country targeting | The largest single driver; premiums of one to two orders of magnitude are ordinary | A country code or region in the name; 1,850 of 7,754 indexed rows are targeted rather than worldwide |
| Refill window | Priced as the seller’s own estimate of drop risk | A refill field on the row; only 1,345 of 7,754 rows carry any window at all |
| Source quality | Bot, real, HQ and HR tiers, in ascending order | Quality wording in the name, which is a claim rather than a measurement |
| Resale depth | Each hop adds a margin, typically 1.8x to 3x | Not visible; inferred from start-time lag and catalogue fingerprints |
Source: Row counts from the PanelCompare price index, 2026-09-10. Markup band from PanelCompare domain research §1.4, 2026-09-06.
Why the index publishes a median and not an average
Several of these markets are bimodal. YouTube subscribers run from $0.0125 at the bot floor to $65.55 at the top, with the lower quartile at $5.43 and the median at $20.16 — two populations, not one distribution. A mean across them would describe a product nobody sells.
How do you tell an underpriced row from a cheap one?
Compare it against the floor of its own service rather than against the median. A row sitting at or below the cheapest figure in the table above is not a bargain on the median product; it is the bottom tier being sold at the bottom price, and the seller usually says so in the row itself with wording like no refill, bulk, or high drop.
- If the row is cheap and carries a refill window, read the window as the seller’s own risk estimate, and confirm the refill mechanism works before ordering volume.
- If the row is cheap and carries no window, it is priced correctly for what it is. Buy it deliberately, or not at all.
- If the row is far below the floor for its service and still claims targeting or a long window, the claim is the part that is wrong: targeting shrinks supply, and supply is what costs money.
- If a whole catalogue drops below the floor at once, that is not a sale. Abrupt catalogue-wide price cuts are one of the recurring signals ahead of an exit.
Which prices cannot be compared at all?
Nineteen of the 182 services in the catalogue are flagged as not comparable, because their rate is not a price per 1,000 units of anything. Ranking those cheapest-first, which every incumbent directory does, produces numbers that are simply wrong.
| Category | What the number actually is | Live range in the index |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube watch hours | Quoted per 1,000 order quantity, where quantity maps to 250–8,000 real hours | $10.69–$32.50 per 1,000 units as quoted; few rows say how many hours that is |
| Live and concurrent viewers | A slot held for a session length, so the rate is meaningless without the duration | TikTok live views $0.098–$149.63 per 1,000 slots |
| Discord server boosts | Rows with min = max = 1, where the per-1,000 figure is the whole order price | $1.42–$7.72 per order |
| Business reviews | Sold per review, listed per 1,000 | Google Business rows listed at $15,000–$75,000, i.e. $15–$75 each |
Source: PanelCompare price index, 2026-09-10, over the 19 of 182 catalogue services flagged as not comparable. Unit definitions from PanelCompare domain research §2.2, 2026-09-06.
How long is a fair price fair for?
Days, not months. Wholesale rates move as source accounts are purged, providers exit and platforms change detection, and a platform bot sweep removes cheap-tier supply outright. That is why every figure on this page carries the date it was captured, and why a price quoted anywhere without one should be treated as decorative.
The practical consequence is that a price researched last month is a hypothesis rather than a budget. Re-check the row before a large order, and prefer panels whose catalogue can be read over the API, because those are the ones an index can keep honest between your visits.
Quick answers
How much should 1,000 Instagram followers cost?
The median offer in the index is $3.13 per 1,000, with the cheapest at $0.01 and the lower quartile at $1.87 (PanelCompare price index, 2026-09-10). Anything near the floor is worldwide bot inventory with no refill, which is a different product from the median row.
Why are YouTube subscribers so much more expensive than views?
Because cost tracks how hard a unit is to fake persistently. A view is one logged event; a subscriber is a durable relationship on an account platforms actively purge. The index median on 2026-09-10 was $2.50 per 1,000 views against $20.16 per 1,000 subscribers.
Is the cheapest SMM panel price real?
Usually yes, and usually for a row you would not want. Floor prices are loss leaders bought to win cheapest-panel searches, and they sit on the lowest-quality inventory with the shortest or no refill window.
How often do SMM panel prices change?
Weekly, and faster during a platform purge, when cheap-tier supply disappears and prices can spike several times over for weeks. Any published price needs a capture date attached to be worth reading.
Every figure here is attributed and dated
Prices in this market move weekly, so a number without a capture date is decorative. Where this guide quotes a figure it names the source and when it was checked. If one of them is wrong, the correction process on the about page has a two-working-day reply target, and corrections are published with a dated note rather than quietly patched.