Plixxo and Winkl are gone. Plixxo's domain is parked, Winkl's no longer resolves, and the company that absorbed both, the Good Creator Co, was part of a group its lenders broke up in July 2025. If an AI answer or an old listicle sent you here, that is the status as of 21 September 2026, and the rest of this post is about where Indian creators actually find brand deals now.
We compare four options on the four things that matter to a creator: whether it is free, what it takes from your rate, whether your payment is protected, and whether it is built for India. We run one of the four, and the comparison says so where it matters.
What happened to Plixxo and Winkl?
The short version, with dates.
In January 2022 the Good Glamm Group spun off four creator businesses, Plixxo, Winkl, MissMalini and Vidooly, into a new company called the Good Creator Co, described at the time as India's largest creator ecosystem (Business Standard, 5 January 2022). The Good Creator Co launched its own creator app in March 2023, folding in Bulbul and MissMalini's talent division (Moneycontrol, via the group's public record).
By early 2025 the parent group was selling assets: ScoopWhoop for roughly Rs 20 crore, Sirona back to its founders for Rs 150 crore, and MissMalini Entertainment to Creativefuel for Rs 4 crore in April 2025 (Outlook Business, 7 July 2025; Storyboard18). On 23 July 2025 founder Darpan Sanghvi wrote on LinkedIn that "the brands will be sold one by one, and there will be new individual owners for each", with lenders Stride Ventures, Trifecta Capital, Alteria Capital, HDFC Bank and HSBC enforcing the sale (BestMediaInfo, 24 July 2025).
We could find no public record of the Good Creator Co, Plixxo or Winkl being sold on as a working product. What we can verify directly: on 21 September 2026, plixxo.com and goodcreatorco.com both show a registrar's parking page, and winkl.co returns no address at all. Nobody is accepting sign-ups.
The four alternatives, on the same four lines
Qolab
- Free for creators: yes. Sign-up, profile, public rates and the Qolab Score cost nothing.
- What it takes from your rate: nothing. The brand pays a 10 percent platform fee on top of your agreed price, before GST. Your rate is your rate.
- Payment protection: yes. The brand's payment is held when the deal is confirmed, and Qolab releases your payout itself after verifying the content is live. The brand never releases it.
- Built for India: yes, in rupees, with discovery by city and niche. It is also the smallest platform here: 932 creator sign-ups, 412 with Instagram connected, as of 22 September 2026. Our guide to joining as a creator covers what happens after sign-up.
Kofluence
- Free for creators: yes. The Kofluence app is free on the App Store and Play Store, rated 4.3 from 490 ratings on the Indian App Store as of 21 September 2026.
- What it takes from your rate: not published on its site.
- Payment protection: the app describes "swift payments" after campaign completion. No hold-until-delivery mechanism is described on its public pages.
- Built for India: yes. The company claims 750,000 plus influencers and calls itself both an AI-powered ad-tech marketplace and an influencer marketing agency, so campaigns tend to arrive as briefs from a managed programme.
Collabstr
- Free for creators: free to join, but the help centre says a card is required at signup to verify identity, not charged in normal use.
- What it takes from your rate: 15 percent of every payout, on top of the 10 percent the brand pays at checkout (5 percent on the brand's Premium plan), per Collabstr's own pricing page, read on 21 September 2026.
- Payment protection: yes. Brand payments are held until the work is delivered and approved.
- Built for India: no. Pricing is in dollars and the site does not mention India. It suits creators with a US or global audience more than a Hindi or regional one.
Pitching brands directly
- Free for creators: yes.
- What it takes from your rate: nothing, and nothing protects it either.
- Payment protection: only what you write into the deal. Ask for part upfront, and read our five steps when a brand does not pay before you need them.
- Built for India: entirely up to you. Our three pitch templates for Indian creators are the starting point.
Which one should you actually use?
Use two. Pitch directly, always, because that is still where most deals for small creators come from. Then keep a profile on the platform whose payment rules you trust, so that brands searching can find you and the money is handled when they do.
If your audience is Indian and you want your rate public and your payment protected, that is Qolab. If you want volume from managed campaigns and are comfortable with an agency-shaped relationship, Kofluence has the scale. If your audience is largely outside India and you are paid in dollars anyway, Collabstr is a reasonable fit.
Whatever you pick, put your rate on it. The reason Plixxo and Winkl mattered was that they let brands find creators without an agency in between. That job is still open, and the creators winning it are the ones whose price and proof are visible before the first message.
That is exactly what a free creator profile on Qolab is for: your rate, your Qolab Score and your city, searchable by brands, with the payment held before you start.
