Trend.io Review 2026: Credit Packs, soona UGC and Verdict

Trend.io is a UGC platform that sells short videos and product photography from a small, US-only vetted creator pool through prepaid credit packs, with perpetual usage rights included and no subscription or platform fee. It is also a platform in its final months under that name: Trend was acquired by soona in June 2023, and on 28 April 2026 soona announced that Trend.io is becoming soona UGC, with credit packs replaced by single videos from $89 and Trend campaigns accessible only “through end of 2026”. Our verdict is 3.5 out of 5. The product that is still for sale on trend.io is good value if you need photos as well as video and can wait three weeks; the product you would actually be committing to in 2027 is a different one, and this review covers both.

This is a sponsored review. We sell TikTok and Instagram followers, likes and views, which is a different product. Neither Trend nor soona has reviewed or approved the text. Every price and policy below is taken from Trend’s live pricing page, soona’s announcements and the Trend Knowledge Center on soona’s support site, all checked in October 2026, and the criticism is ours. Links to Billo, our number one pick in this category, carry tracking parameters.

Trend at a glance

• What it is: a project-based UGC marketplace. Brands post a brief, vetted creators apply, each hired creator delivers 2 videos or 5 photos, and the brand owns the files.
• Price (legacy, still live): credit packs from $550 for up to 6 videos or 15 photos to $3,872 for up to 56 videos or 140 photos. Credits cost $9.16 each and expire 12 months after purchase.
• Price (successor): soona UGC, single videos from $89 with no pack to buy, ranging to $259 per video by creator tier.
• Fee on top: none, under either model.
• Creators: “3,700+” in the network and “15K+” on the waitlist per trend.io; US-only, iPhone-only, and admitted at roughly a 35% approval rate per soona.
• Turnaround: creators have 7 days from product delivery to upload; a full multi-creator order averages 2 to 3 weeks.
• Revisions: 1 revision per creator on Trend; up to 2 per video on soona UGC.
• Rights: full licensing on approval; the governing terms grant a “non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, transferable, and sublicensable” licence.
• Refunds: “All fees are non-cancelable and non-refundable” under the current terms.
• Public ratings: 4.6 on Capterra from 77 reviews, the newest from May 2023; 2.9 on Trustpilot from 7 reviews, mostly 2024 to 2026 and mostly one-star.
• Best for: US ecommerce brands that need listing and page photography as well as video, can plan three weeks ahead, and are comfortable moving to soona’s platform.

What Trend is, and what it is becoming

Trend began as a micro-influencer marketplace. Its iOS app still describes itself as an “invite-only network of influencers”, and its older case studies count impressions and posts. Somewhere around 2020 it pivoted to selling the content rather than the posting, and by the time of the acquisition the pitch was the one on its homepage today: “No subscriptions. No platform costs. Just UGC that drives sales.”

The company was founded by Ramon Berrios and Zach Moosbrugger, moved from Austin to Miami, and raised a $3 million pre-seed in July 2022 led by Flybridge, with Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition and Techstars among the participants. At that point it reported over 1,000 brands and more than 100,000 content pieces. Eleven months later, on 27 June 2023, soona, the Denver virtual-photo-studio company, bought it as its first acquisition. soona said Trend then had over 1,500 companies, 20,000 projects and roughly 1,000 approved creators out of 2,000 hand-selected.

For almost three years Trend kept running at trend.io. Then on 28 April 2026 soona announced “Trend.io is now soona UGC”, with a beta from 30 April. The announcement says three things change: campaign management gets clearer scorecards, Trend’s creator “Levels” become soona “creator tiers”, and the credit-package requirement is eliminated in favour of single videos starting at $89. Brands keep access to their Trend campaigns and content “through end of 2026”, and conversion to soona UGC happens “throughout 2026”. Trend’s own help centre now lives on support.soona.co, its creator sign-up page sends applicants to soona, and trend.io/terms serves soona’s terms of service.

So if you are evaluating Trend in late 2026, you are evaluating a known quantity that is closing and a successor that is in beta. Everything below is labelled accordingly.

How a Trend project works

The workflow, with the time windows the Knowledge Center attaches to each step. These windows are the most useful thing in this review, because they decide whether an order goes smoothly.

1. Buy credits. Packs from $550. Credits are not tied to a campaign and can be spread across several; they expire one year from purchase.
2. Create a project. Choose photo (5 images per creator) or video (2 videos per creator), describe the product and creative direction, and set what creators must show.
3. Review applications. “Similar to a job posting, creators apply to work with your brand,” as the brand guide puts it. You read profiles and portfolios and approve the ones you want. Trend does not publish how many applicants to expect.
4. Activate and ship. Approving a creator costs 20, 40 or 60 credits depending on their Level. Their address appears under Creators and Shipments, and you must enter tracking for each parcel.
5. The 7-day creator clock. Once the product is marked delivered, Trend starts a 7-day countdown for the creator to upload. Support steps in if nothing has arrived by day 10.
6. The 7-day brand clock. You have 7 days from upload to approve or request a revision. Content that reaches the 7-day mark is auto-approved.
7. One revision. You are allowed one revision per content category per creator, and the creator has 3 days to resubmit. Rejection outright is “reserved if the creator clearly didn’t follow something in the campaign brief”; the Knowledge Center’s example is a brief that asked for outdoors and a video shot in a living room.
8. Approve and own. On approval the creator is paid and “the licensing rights to the content are now yours”.

Add it up for a physical product: two or three days to approve applicants, a week in the post, seven days to shoot, up to seven to review, three for a revision. Trend’s own “2 to 3 weeks” for a full order is accurate and, for a multi-creator project, optimistic, because the project finishes when the last creator does.

What is in scope, and what is not

Trend publishes a scope page, and it is worth reading before you buy, because several things brands assume are included are explicitly out.

Included: 5 photos per photo campaign or 2 videos per video campaign, each with one round of revisions; product, portrait and lifestyle photography; product-in-use, unboxing and review or testimonial videos; scripted content where the brand supplies the script.

Not included: influencer posting to the creator’s own account, raw footage, long-form content over one minute, “heavily edited, or highly produced content”, custom prop sourcing, rate negotiation, and strategy or curation. Creators may not buy the product themselves; brands must ship it or provide a free code.

The two that bite most often are raw footage and the one-minute cap. If your editor wants rushes to cut multiple ads from, Trend is the wrong order. If your brief is a 90-second explainer, the same.

Pricing in detail

The legacy credit packs

Pack	Price	Credits	Covers	Per video	Per photo
Starter	$550	60	up to 6 videos or 15 photos	$91.67	$36.67
Essential	$1,045	140	up to 14 videos or 35 photos	$74.64	$29.86
Growth	$1,980	280	up to 28 videos or 70 photos	$70.71	$28.29
Scale	$3,872	560	up to 56 videos or 140 photos	$69.14	$27.66

The per-unit figures are Trend’s own, and they carry an assumption the pricing page does not spell out: they are correct only if every creator you hire is Level 1. Trend’s credits page explains that a Level 1 creator costs 20 credits, Level 2 costs 40 and Level 3 costs 60. At $9.16 a credit that is about $183, $366 and $550 per creator, or roughly $92, $183 and $275 per video, since each creator delivers two. The Levels are described as personas rather than criteria: Level 1 “bubbly and enthusiastic”, Level 2 a “photography perfectionist”, Level 3 a skilled videographer with advanced editing. The “$69 to $92 per video” headline is the floor, and a project mixing Levels will land well above it. One Capterra reviewer’s complaint that “VIP influencer pricing wasn’t clearly communicated upfront” is this exact gap.

Other terms on the packs: a 10% discount on a first purchase with the code FIRSTCREDIT10, 15% off large packs via a consultation, credits that expire after a year, and no refunds. The brand FAQ points to a refund clause in the terms, but the terms now served at trend.io are soona’s, whose section 6.7 reads “All fees are non-cancelable and non-refundable.” A Trustpilot reviewer in June 2026 describes buying “$500 credit” and being told “it can no longer be used as it is past 12 months”, which is the expiry working as written.

The soona UGC successor

soona UGC drops the packs. Its brand guide says “Level 1 (Classic) starts at $89/video. Higher creator levels are priced accordingly,” and soona’s UGC page gives the range as $89 to $259 per video. There are no annual commitments; you buy “as little or as much content as you need”. Brands get up to 2 revision requests per video per creator, with 72 hours for the creator to re-upload, and content is due 7 days after the product is marked delivered. The approval rate soona cites for creators is about 35%.

Read as a buyer, the successor is better on three counts: no $550 minimum, no credits to lose after twelve months, and two revisions instead of one. It is unknown on the count that matters most, which is whether the photography product and the same creator pool survive the transition intact. soona’s announcement says perpetual rights and the vetted pool are unchanged. It does not say what happens to Trend’s per-photo pricing.

Against the alternatives

Under the legacy packs, Trend’s Level 1 floor of $69 to $92 a video is below Billo’s $99 and far below Insense’s $100-plus-fee-plus-subscription. Under soona UGC, the $89 entry price is within ten dollars of Billo and the comparison comes down to what surrounds the video, which we cover below. We ran the all-in arithmetic for ten videos across all five platforms in our ranking of the best UGC marketplaces.

Creators: who they are and where

Trend’s pool is small by design. The homepage says 3,700+ creators against a 15,000+ waitlist, and soona puts the approval rate at 35%. Every creator is in the United States, because the brand FAQ says so plainly: “We currently only have creators in the US,” with international expansion “hoped for”. On the creator side, the creator FAQ requires an iOS device (“Android not currently supported”) and “USA-based creators only”, with decisions on applications within 30 days.

Creators are paid automatically when the brand approves their deliverables and the campaign is marked complete. Exact pay per Level is not published; third-party creator guides put Trend’s photography pay in the range of $75 to $250 per deliverable and note it had no follower minimum. Creator deadlines are strict: 7 days to upload after the product arrives, 3 days for a revision, and indefinite suspension if content is not uploaded within 48 hours of going overdue. That strictness is part of why delivery is reliable, and part of why the App Store reviews from creators are mixed, at 4.0 from 308 ratings, with complaints about rarely being selected and about being removed from the platform without warning.

Quality, as described by brands, is consistent in look and uneven in fit. The strongest praise on Capterra is about speed of applications: “You no longer find influencers; they find you. I set up a campaign and in no time I had 15 influencers that want to work with me.” The sharpest criticism, from a media buyer in May 2023, is that most available creators “appear to be of low quality, primarily catering to the oversaturated skincare market”. Both can be true of a 3,700-person pool: plenty of applicants, few of them right for a niche. If you are in fitness, nutrition or anything outside beauty and home, post a small project first and look at who applies before buying a large pack.

Rights, revisions and what happens when it goes wrong

Rights are the clearest in the category. On approval the licence is yours, and the governing terms define it as “non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, transferable, and sublicensable”. There is nothing to negotiate and no expiry, which is a genuine advantage over Insense and Collabstr, where usage is part of each creator’s price.

Revisions are one per creator per content category on Trend, two per video on soona UGC. Both are tied to the brief: a revision fixes something the brief asked for, and a change of direction is a new project.

Non-delivery is covered by reimbursement of credits, and the pricing page guarantees creators will produce. Lost product is not covered. The FAQ calls it “a known risk of content creation” and recommends insuring parcels and uploading tracking, which contradicts the homepage line about no lost product being “guaranteed”. Trust the FAQ.

Refunds of money, as opposed to credits, are where the recent complaints concentrate. A Software Advice reviewer who asked for a refund over an unresponsive creator was “informed unequivocally that the money had already been allocated”. Under the current terms, fees are non-refundable. Go in treating a pack as spent on purchase.

What customers say, and when they said it

Trend’s review record splits cleanly into two eras, and the date matters more than the score.

Pre-acquisition. On Capterra, Trend holds 4.6 out of 5 from 77 reviews, with ease of use at 4.8 and customer service at 4.8, and 95% of reviewers positive. GetApp and Software Advice show the same 77 reviews. The oldest is from July 2020 and the newest from May 2023, a month before soona bought the company. The praise is about simplicity (“extremely easy to use”, “setting up campaigns takes minimal time”) and about having shipping, pricing and communication in one place. The criticism, even then, was about accountability: a founder who was ghosted by a creator and then saw the same creator apply to the next campaign asked “Why weren’t they flagged?”, and another wrote that “there are no repercussions for creators not fulfilling their end of the bargain.”

Post-acquisition. On Trustpilot, the only site with 2024 to 2026 brand reviews, Trend scores 2.9 from 7 reviews, 72% of them one-star, and the company has not replied to any of them. The themes are expired credits, a creator who delivered a video featuring a different product, support that did not answer emails, and, from one reviewer, having an account closed after leaving a creator one-star feedback. Seven reviews is a small sample and the tone of the one-stars is heated, but the themes line up with the terms: credits expire, fees are non-refundable, and the quality lever is the brief rather than a refund.

Aggregator ratings such as SelectHub’s “94% user satisfaction” are built on the 2020 to 2023 Capterra base and should be read as a description of Trend at its best, not of the platform in transition.

Case studies

Trend publishes two with numbers. Kettle & Fire, the bone-broth brand, used 11 pieces of custom photography and reported $4 in revenue for every $1 spent on Facebook ads, a 61% rise in ROAS over its previous best creative, and a 52% improvement in reach-to-purchase. Mizzen+Main, the menswear brand, ran an influencer-era campaign with 21 creators and 58 posts for a reported 2.7x ROAS and a 50% reduction in time spent managing campaigns, at $100 per creator, which dates it. Both are brand-reported, selected by the vendor, and from before the current pricing.

A note on Trend’s own comparison pages

trend.io carries “Trend vs Billo” and “Trend vs Insense” pages that still cite $50 a video and 9,000 creators for Trend. Those figures contradict the live pricing page and homepage and appear to predate the credit model. We mention it because they rank in search and because the same caution applies in reverse: Billo’s own “Trend alternatives” post describes a $500 monthly subscription Trend does not charge. Use the pricing pages, not the comparison pages, from any vendor including the one we recommend.

Pros and cons

Pros

• Lowest Level 1 price of the vetted platforms, and product photography at $28 to $37 a shot with rights.
• No subscription and no percentage fee; the pack price is the price.
• Perpetual, worldwide, sublicensable rights on approval, with nothing to negotiate.
• Reimbursement of credits if a creator does not deliver, and a strict delivery clock on creators.
• Simple enough to hand to a junior marketer: brief, shortlist, approve, receive.
• Successor model removes the minimum and the expiry and doubles the revisions.

Cons

• Platform in transition; Trend campaigns are accessible only through the end of 2026.
• $550 minimum, 12-month credit expiry and non-refundable fees under the legacy packs.
• Published per-video prices assume Level 1 creators; Level 3 is about $275 a video.
• US-only, iPhone-only creators; the pool thins outside beauty and home.
• No raw footage, nothing over a minute, no posting, no partnership ads, no analytics.
• 7-day auto-approval and one revision leave little room for a slow reviewer.
• Recent reviews are poor and unanswered, and lost product is not covered.

Who Trend is for

Use Trend, or rather soona UGC, if you sell physical products to a US audience, you need listing and page photography alongside short video, you can plan three weeks ahead, and you want the rights question settled before you pay. The one-revision, 7-day structure also suits a brand that writes a precise brief and reviews promptly.

Look elsewhere if you need creators outside the US, raw footage or anything over a minute, if you want the platform to run partnership ads or organic tests from the same order, if a $550 pack you might not use in a year is a real cost, or if you would rather not migrate platforms in your first year as a customer.

Trend vs Billo

• Price: Trend Level 1 at $69 to $92 (legacy) or $89 (soona) against Billo from $99. Both flat, no fee.
• Minimum: Trend $550 pack, expiring in a year, until the migration; Billo $500 pack, also valid for twelve months.
• Speed: both about 7 days of production; Trend’s full orders run 2 to 3 weeks against Billo’s 7 to 12 business days.
• Photos: Trend’s core product; Billo’s four-photo add-on.
• Revisions: Trend one, soona two, Billo two.
• Around the video: Billo has a brief generator, performance-based matching, organic posting and partnership ads. Trend has none of these.
• Recent reviews: Billo 4.0 on Trustpilot from 520; Trend 2.9 from 7.

Our ranking puts Billo first and Trend third because most brands buying UGC are buying it for paid social, Billo’s tooling is built for that, and Billo is not changing platforms this year. Where Trend wins is stills in volume with rights, and that case still holds.

Frequently asked questions

Is Trend.io still operating?

Yes, but it is being folded into soona UGC. soona acquired Trend in June 2023 and announced the migration on 28 April 2026. Trend campaigns remain accessible through the end of 2026, and trend.io still sells credit packs, but new customers are being moved to soona UGC.

How much does Trend cost?

Legacy credit packs run from $550 for up to 6 videos or 15 photos to $3,872 for up to 56 videos or 140 photos, at $9.16 a credit. A creator costs 20, 40 or 60 credits by Level and delivers 2 videos or 5 photos. soona UGC replaces this with single videos from $89 to $259.

Do Trend credits expire?

Yes, one year from purchase, and fees are non-refundable under the current terms. soona UGC has no credits.

Does Trend include usage rights?

Yes. On approval the licence is yours, defined in the terms as non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, transferable and sublicensable. soona says this is unchanged under soona UGC.

How many revisions does Trend include?

One per creator per content category, with 3 days for the creator to resubmit. soona UGC allows up to two per video with 72 hours to re-upload.

Where are Trend’s creators?

All in the United States, on iPhones. Trend’s FAQ says it has no international creators yet.

How long does a Trend order take?

Creators have 7 days from product delivery to upload, and you have 7 days to review before auto-approval. A full multi-creator order averages 2 to 3 weeks plus shipping.

Is Trend worth it compared with Billo?

For product photography with rights, yes. For video going into paid social, Billo’s tooling, two revisions and stable platform make it the better buy at a similar per-video price, which is why it ranks first in our comparison.

Verdict

Trend scores 3.5 out of 5 and takes third place in our ranking of UGC marketplaces. The product on trend.io today is the best-value vetted order on the list if photography is part of what you need and the brief is precise: flat price, rights included, a delivery clock that keeps creators honest. The reasons it does not score higher are the $550 minimum with a one-year expiry, a Level system that makes the headline price a floor, US-only creators, no raw footage, and a thin and unhappy set of recent reviews. The reason it may score differently next year is that it will be soona UGC, which fixes the minimum, the expiry and the revision count, and which nobody outside soona has used for long enough to review.

Sources

• Trend pricing, credits and Levels, terms of service
• soona: Trend.io is now soona UGC (28 April 2026), soona: We acquired Trend (27 June 2023), soona UGC
• Trend Knowledge Center on soona support: brand guide, brand FAQ, scope, reviewing content, creator FAQ, soona UGC brand guide
• Reviews: Capterra, Trustpilot, Software Advice, App Store
• Company: Tubefilter on the 2022 pre-seed, FinSMEs
• Case studies: Kettle & Fire, Mizzen+Main
• Context: FTC Endorsement Guides FAQ on disclosure when a brand pays for content