A Dubai business creator with 16,000 Instagram followers charged AED 3,800 for a single carousel post about a Dubai-based productivity app last week. A beauty creator in Sharjah with 9,000 followers ran a 45-minute Instagram Live with a skincare brand and charged AED 4,500. These formats sit outside the Reel-and-Story playbook most UAE creators default to. Brands are starting to budget for them seriously, and creators who price them correctly are picking up real incremental revenue without producing any video at all.
How do you price a carousel post?
Carousels are underrated in the UAE creator economy because most creators treat them as a freebie thrown in with a Reel deal. They should not be. A 5 to 10 slide carousel takes 2 to 5 hours of work (concept, copywriting, design or photography, layout) and lives on the feed permanently. Stand-alone carousel pricing should be 60 to 90 percent of your in-feed photo post rate.
- Micro creators (5K-15K): AED 800 to AED 2,500 per branded carousel
- Mid creators (15K-50K): AED 2,500 to AED 7,500 per carousel
- Macro creators (50K-150K): AED 7,500 to AED 22,000 per carousel
- Educational/business carousels (high effort): 1.3 to 1.5 times standard
What about Threads posts?
Threads is small in the UAE but growing. Brand interest is currently low for stand-alone Threads work, but adding Threads as a free or low-cost add-on to existing Reel/Story bundles is a smart positioning move because brand managers like multi-platform reach. Standalone Threads campaigns are now starting to price at AED 500 to AED 2,500 per branded post in the 10K-50K tier. Expect this to grow significantly through 2026 as Meta's push for Threads accelerates.
How do you price an Instagram Live?
Instagram Lives with brands have been re-energised in the UAE in 2026, especially for product launches and brand education. A 30 to 60 minute branded Live is real work: pre-promotion, the live itself, and post-Live Stories driving people to the replay. Standalone Live pricing should be 1.2 to 1.8 times your Reel rate because of the prep and the live performance pressure.
What is fair for branded Story polls and Q&A?
Story polls and Q&A featuring a brand are a smaller deliverable but still worth charging for. A series of 3 to 5 branded Stories with poll/Q&A interactions runs AED 800 to AED 4,500 in the 15K-40K tier. Brands like this format because the engagement data is rich (votes, responses) and they get an audience signal. Don't throw it in for free with another deliverable: itemise it.
How do AMA Lives differ from product launch Lives?
An AMA Live (where you take audience questions about a brand or topic) is lower effort than a product launch Live (where you and a brand rep showcase a new product). AMA Lives in the UAE run AED 2,500 to AED 8,500 in the 15K-40K tier. Product launch Lives run 1.5 to 2 times that because they require more prep, slides, and brand-side coordination. Both should be itemised separately on your storefront.
What about LinkedIn long-form posts?
LinkedIn is becoming a serious creator format in Dubai for business audiences. UAE creators with strong LinkedIn followings (5K to 50K) are now charging AED 1,500 to AED 12,000 for a branded long-form LinkedIn post. The audience match for B2B brands is excellent and the format is text-heavy, which is much faster to produce than video. Most creators ignore LinkedIn entirely, which means the rates for serious LinkedIn creators are protected.
How should you bundle newer formats with existing offerings?
Add newer formats as upgrade options to standard bundles, not as the main product. Example: standard bundle is Reel + Stories + post for AED 6,500. Upgrade option adds a carousel for AED 1,800 (versus AED 2,500 standalone). Brands love bundle upgrades because they feel like a deal. You capture incremental revenue on formats that take less time than your core deliverables.
New formats are where the unclaimed revenue is. While most UAE creators are stuck pricing Reels and Stories, the smart ones are picking up AED 2,500 carousels and AED 4,500 Lives that take half the production time. Build a multi-format menu on your storefront and let brand managers see the full range of what you offer.