Glossary
What Is Kill Fee?
A kill fee is the amount a brand still owes a creator if a campaign is cancelled after the creator has already put in work — filming, editing, or both — rather than nothing at all. Without a kill fee clause, the default answer if a brand cancels is that the creator is owed nothing, no matter how much production time has already gone into the shoot.
A standard structure pays 50 percent once production has commenced and the full fee once content has actually been delivered, regardless of whether the brand ultimately uses or approves it. Brands restructure and cancel campaigns constantly for reasons that have nothing to do with the creator's work, so a kill fee is less a negotiating luxury than basic protection against a total loss on a shoot day that has already happened.
What to watch for: contracts that simply do not mention cancellation at all. The absence of a kill fee clause is itself a clause — it means the brand owes nothing if the campaign is pulled — so it needs adding explicitly rather than assumed to be standard. It is also one of the easiest clauses to get agreed, because at the point of signing it is still hypothetical for both sides.
In practice
A brand cancels a campaign two days after a creator has filmed the Reel but before it goes live. Her contract's 50% kill fee clause means she is paid $1,170 of the $2,340 fee for the shoot day already spent, instead of walking away with nothing.
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