It goes without saying that the creator is a critical component of a brand’s marketing campaign. In cases where a campaign achieves success, the creator is almost always in the spotlight as one of the reasons for its success. 

The problem is, for many creators – no matter the size of the following – it usually takes one to three months, even longer, before they get paid. For one payment system focused on the creator economy, this is completely unnecessary.

Hydrant Pay believes that the same banking tools that enable immediate payment in traditional industries can work for creators, too. That’s why it built the infrastructure to pay creators within 24 hours of completing brand work. Their non-recourse invoice factoring platform eliminates the draining wait for payment while handling all collection follow-ups with brands and agencies.

As Hydrant Pay CEO Thomas Doherty and CMO Jack Cook note, this model works because it solves problems for everyone: Creators get paid immediately, agencies can offer faster payments without straining their cash flow, and brands maintain their existing payment terms. 

By partnering with one of the country’s largest factoring institutions, Hydrant Pay is the first company to make instant creator payments truly scalable.

How It Works: The Payment Innovation

To address a growing payment crisis in the creator economy, Hydrant Pay developed a solution that leverages traditional banking to serve creators. 

When creators upload an invoice to the platform, Hydrant Pay verifies it with the brand or agency and then releases payment within 24 hours. “If it gets processed before 11:00 am Central Time in the U.S., the creator should expect it by midnight that same day,” explains Thomas.

The service takes a 5% fee from the invoice amount. For example, with a $1,000 invoice, creators receive $950 immediately instead of waiting months for full payment. Thomas describes the straightforward process: “When a creator has an invoice that they’re ready to get paid on, whether the terms are 30, 60 or 90 days, they come onto our platform, create an account, and upload their invoice.”

Notably, creators face no risk if brands pay late. “Once we buy the invoice directly from the creator, it is no longer the creator’s responsibility to do any of the follow-ups,” Jack emphasizes. “We take all of that responsibility and risk off of the creator. That way, they can get their money, get paid, and are good to go.”

Making a Difference in Creators’ Lives

While the system operates simply, its effects on creators’ lives and businesses prove substantial. The mental health benefits stand out particularly.

Jack shares from personal experience: “As a creator, you might not get the money even when you follow up. If it says net 60 on the contract, you might not get it on net 60 because it goes to the next Friday because that’s when they do their payment runs.”

Payment uncertainty affects daily life significantly. “When I’m trying to pay my bills, and I know that I have four different contracts that are out ready to be paid, but I’m just waiting on the money to come in, rent is coming up, and the credit card bill is due; it gets very stressful,” Jack notes. “Sometimes you have so many different payments going on that you might not remember that you need to follow up with one of them. And so one of them slips through the cracks, and you remember six months later.”

A recent success story features a creator who needed gym equipment for content creation while moving into a new house. Using Hydrant Pay, he accessed funds three months ahead of payment terms, improving both his content creation schedule and business prospects.

“Now he has 90 more days to make content with the purchase that he made, which helps his business because now he is 90 days earlier on making those videos and potentially working with other brands,” Jack explains.

Users consistently return to the platform. “We’ve seen that it’s pretty sticky. Every single creator who has used it and enjoyed getting their money faster has come back with more invoices,” Thomas notes.

Solving the Agency Bottleneck

Individual creator successes revealed another opportunity: helping agencies manage similar cash flow challenges at scale. Many agencies struggle with creator payments while awaiting brand funds, sometimes requiring loans to cover payments.

“When we educate the agency on how our service is set up, and explain that their payables get alleviated, they are excited to finally have a solution for that bottleneck issue,” Thomas explains. “Once those agencies are partnered directly with us, the payment flow is much quicker, too.”

The solution addresses multiple challenges: “The agency is stuck in the middle saying, ‘We hope that it’ll be here next week,’ but they’re just waiting on the brand to pay them,” Jack notes. “And some of the payouts get so big that some of these agencies actually have to go to a bank and get a loan from the bank just to pay out their creators with interest.”

The Education Challenge

Expanding these services to agencies, however, revealed a broader challenge in the creator economy. While invoice factoring is common in traditional industries, it represents a new concept in the creator space.

“An agency that’s never heard of invoice factoring before is sort of confused at who we are,” Jack explains. “We have to do a lot of legwork upfront in having those conversations and educating on how the service works. I think eventually we will get to a cultural shift, agencies across the board will start to understand what it is and why it’s important for them to have it and for creators to have it.”

Preparing for Growth

Despite these educational hurdles, Hydrant Pay’s foundation in traditional banking provides a clear path forward. 

“We’re prepped and ready to scale as fast as we need, which is the beauty of our partnership with the bank,” Thomas explains, noting that established financial infrastructure allows Hydrant Pay to focus on creator services rather than raising capital or building banking relationships from scratch.

New features are being developed to improve efficiency. “We have a new way for the creator to upload the invoice into our site and also send the email for that invoice directly into the site as well,” Jack reveals. “The goal in 2025 is to create a lot of ease and automation for the creator and decrease the amount of touch points needed on our end to be able to process a transaction.”

As the creator economy continues to mature and embrace financial infrastructure, Hydrant Pay aims to make delayed payments a relic of the past. 

“I would love for new creators to come around and be confused that there used to be creators waiting 60 to 90 days to get paid,” Jack shares. “It doesn’t make sense how people were waiting months to get paid for something.”

This vision extends beyond just solving payment delays. By bringing established financial infrastructure to the creator economy, Hydrant Pay is helping the industry mature into a more sustainable, professional ecosystem where creators can focus on what they do best: creating content.

The opportunity is significant. As Jack notes, “There are a lot of infrastructure inefficiencies overall in the creator economy because it’s so new. Other industries that have been around for 100+ years have a lot of this infrastructure already built out… And I think there will be a lot of other companies that will come along and provide infrastructure that the creator economy needs. I think Hydrant is one of them.”