What is a post worth?
A post has a two-part price: a flat amount for the post itself, and a bounded bonus for the reach it earned.
One viral post cannot be allowed to drain the bank. The bound is set before it happens.
What are you actually buying?
A public post from a real user, in their own words, with the relationship disclosed, shown to their own network, which tends to do similar work. That is reach with a face on it, aimed by nature at the people most likely to become users. Products pay for weaker versions of this all the time.
Why price the post and not the click?
Because the post is the behavior you want more of, and rewards shape behavior. Pay per signup and you have built a referral program: users optimize for link-pushing, and the ones without an audience of buyers earn nothing and stop. Pay for the post and every user has the same offer.
The two-part price
The claim value pays for the post. Flat, known in advance, the same whenever the post is verified. The reach bonus pays for the reach it earned: bounded, so the worst case is a number you chose, and settled once the reach has had time to build. The decisions behind it are their own page.
The bounds
Generous enough that posting is obviously worth doing; a reward nobody would cross the room for buys you nothing. Not so rich that a handful of quiet posts costs more than it brings in. Inside those bounds, one user posting often with posts that land is not a leak. It is the program working.
Questions founders ask
How much should I reward a user for one post?
High enough that posting is obviously worth doing, low enough that quiet posts don’t outrun their value. What your old free plan gave a user in a month is a natural peg for what a regular poster should come away with, and an always-poster should beat it. Keep the base modest and let the reach bonus carry the rest.
Why not pay per signup instead?
Paying on signups is a referral program — a different tool with different failure modes, and the reward stops matching the behavior you want, which is the public post itself. An earned tier pays the post whether or not a signup follows, which is also what keeps it clean of per-head bounty incentives.
Do bigger accounts deserve bigger rewards?
Reach is priced by result, not by follower count. The reach bonus pays for the reach the post earned, up to a bound you know in advance, and a small account whose post actually landed out-earns a big one that posts into silence, which is the incentive you want. How to measure reach so that nobody can buy it is its own set of decisions.