NIL Platforms & Marketplaces for Student-Athletes

A business finds your profile in an app, offers you a few hundred dollars for a post, and you accept with one tap. The money shows up a couple of weeks later.

That's an NIL marketplace, sometimes called an NIL platform: an app or website that connects athletes with the companies that want to pay for their name, image, or likeness. It's also where a lot of athletes stop paying attention, and the part that comes after the tap is the part that costs people.

I started playing football at Boise State in 2021, the year NIL arrived. That's when I got introduced to money management and taxes, with nobody showing me how either one worked.

I was too scared to touch my money. I didn't pay anything toward my taxes until the year was over.

Some of my teammates went the other way. They spent what they made, and by tax season they owed the IRS thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Some covered it with the next year's paychecks.

Those are two extremes, and most athletes land somewhere in between. But I lived the stress of getting ready for tax season as an athlete, and I watched my teammates carry it too.

Being a college athlete is two full-time jobs: your sport and your degree. As NIL grew, more money came in, and we were expected to manage it on top of both. I found that hard to balance, and I wanted something better for my teammates and for athletes across the country. That's why we built Veloro.

The problems are still there. Most athletes have little experience managing money. The sport and the degree already take the hours. And the financial risk is real. Marketplaces make the money easier to get. They don't solve any of those three.

Here's how these platforms actually work, and what's still on you.

If you're wondering how to get NIL money through a marketplace, the loop is the same on almost every platform:

1. 1You build a profile: your sport, school, social accounts, and what you're open to doing.
2. 2NIL companies browse athlete profiles, or post the NIL deals available to athletes who fit.
3. 3An offer comes in: an NIL sponsorship deal for a post, an appearance, an autograph signing, a camp.
4. 4You accept, do the work, and prove you did it.
5. 5The platform pays you out.

The companies offering NIL deals on these platforms range from local businesses to national brands. Some platforms are open to any athlete. Some are set up in partnership with a school or a conference.

In most cases the business pays the platform, the platform keeps a cut, and you get the rest.

That cut varies from platform to platform, and sometimes from deal to deal. The number on the offer isn't always the number that lands in your account. Find out which one you're looking at before you say yes.

This is the part that matters.

Disclosure is still on your side of the table. Any third-party deal of $600 or more has to be reported to your school's compliance office and the NIL Go portal within five business days of signing. It doesn't matter whether the deal came through an app or a text from a local car dealer. Some platforms help with this, and some don't. Ask.

Nothing is withheld. When a marketplace pays you, nobody takes tax out first. Not the platform, not the business, not your school. You're responsible for every dollar of it.

Brand deals are self-employment income. Commercial NIL deals are reported on a 1099-NEC and are subject to self-employment tax of 15.3%, on top of federal and state income tax.

No form doesn't mean no tax. Starting with tax year 2026, a payer only has to send you a 1099 once they've paid you $2,000 or more in the year. That changes when you get a form, not what you owe. A $1,500 deal has to be disclosed to your school, may never produce a 1099, and is fully taxable. A tax return is required once your net self-employment earnings hit $400.

The $600 disclosure rule and the $2,000 form rule used to line up. They don't anymore, and that gap is where people get surprised. The Two $600 NIL Rules walks through it, and Do I Pay Taxes on NIL Money? covers the basics.

Not which platform to use. That depends on your sport, your school, and what you're comfortable doing. These are the questions worth asking on any of them:

• What's the platform's cut, and is the offer amount before or after it?
• Who reports this deal to my compliance office: me, or the platform?
• When do I actually get paid?
• Will I get a tax form, and from whom: the platform or the business?
• Where am I writing this down? If the answer is "nowhere," that's the one to fix first.

If you searched for a list of NIL companies for athletes, this isn't one, and that's on purpose. We've run our own campaign through one of these marketplaces, so I'm not neutral on whether they're useful. I think they are. That's exactly why I'm not ranking them. You should hear it from me that I have a relationship with one, and you shouldn't take a ranking from someone who does.

Veloro doesn't replace a marketplace, and it doesn't hold your money. You log each deal, from any platform or none, and it shows you an estimated tax set-aside based on the deals you've actually entered, using CPA-backed calculations.

Source: NIL Go disclosure trigger ($600, five business days) — College Sports Commission July 2026 NIL report, via Business of College Sports, published July 17, 2026. Retrieved August 21, 2026.

Source: NIL income reporting and the $400 filing threshold — IRS, Name, image and likeness income, updated August 14, 2026.

Source: the 1099 threshold moving to $2,000 for tax year 2026 — Avalara and CPA Practice Advisor.

Last updated: September 29, 2026.