Money, creative and proof, in the questions

Fees, wallet and minimums, answered in full.

The fee, the tier above £25,000 of trailing spend, the two minimums nobody mentions until the plan is built, and the smallest budget at which any of this makes sense — which is higher than the published floor, and the pricing page says so.
questions in this group, each answered in full
7
pages the answers are written on, every one linked
1
questions across the whole set
148
On this page
1 question

The short answers

Written for this index rather than for a single page, because these are the questions asked before a reader has chosen a page at all.

What does it cost?

10% of media spend, disclosed per line, with no spread. Above £25,000 of trailing 30-day spend the rate drops to 5% plus a £749 monthly platform fee. AI asset production is charged separately at a published rate and never blended into the media fee. There is no subscription and no seat fee at the standard rate. What you fund up front is the wallet, prepaid with a £100 minimum top-up, and above the threshold that £749 is a fixed monthly charge rather than a usage one. A per-channel plan floor is enforced when the plan is built. Below about £10,000 a month in total media this is the wrong product, and the pricing page says why.

6 questions

Fees and wallet

Written on Fees and wallet, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.

Read the page these answers live on →

What does AdBuyMCP cost?

10% of media spend, disclosed per line, with no spread. Above £25,000 of trailing 30-day spend the rate drops to 5% and a £749 monthly platform fee applies. AI asset production is charged separately at a published rate — 50p for an image, £1.25 for a voiceover, £6.00 for ten seconds of standard video — and is never blended into the media fee. There is no subscription and no seat fee at the standard rate. What you do fund up front is the wallet, which is prepaid with a £100 minimum top-up, and above the threshold that monthly fee is a fixed charge rather than a usage one. A per-channel plan floor is enforced when the plan is built.

Is there a hidden margin on the media?

The commitment is that there is none: the fee engine is built with no spread, one ledger entry accrues per delivery row carrying that row's date, campaign, channel, spend and fee, and the terms commit to media passed through at cost with no undisclosed margin, rebate or arbitrage. Being precise about the status of that: it is a contractual commitment and a design property, not yet a demonstrated practice, because no rail has ever spent and therefore no invoice has ever been reconciled against it. The one place a margin does exist is AI asset production, at an 80% margin on raw provider cost — five times cost — published and charged as its own line.

Why is asset production charged separately rather than included?

Because bundling it is how a margin becomes invisible. It is a genuinely harder sell — Universal Ads and Global AdPower both include AI creative — and the honest case is that a separately charged line you can audit is worth more than a free one you cannot. What this page will not do is quote a saving against traditional production to make £15.60 look generous: the platform carried such a figure, deleted it as unsourced, and added a test to stop it returning. There is no sourced production-cost comparison here.

What is the smallest sensible budget?

Around £10,000 a month across everything, and the published floor of £2,000 is lower than that for reasons of packaging rather than sense. At £2,000 the fee is £200, the support requirement is at its highest, and a multi-channel plan cannot carry enough weight on any single line to pace or to prove anything. Two channels funded properly beats a token line on all seven.

Do I pay for the sandbox?

No. The whole loop — brief, persona, seven compiled plans, creative, approval, launch, delivery, measurement, journeys, optimisation — runs with no credentials and no card, and the data it returns is realistic and repeatable rather than a scripted demo. Charges begin at real media and at real asset generation, both of which incur a real cost to somebody.

What happens to my money if a supplier fails?

It stays held. A wallet reservation is only released once spend has been reconciled to the provider's own invoice or account export, and that final match is rechecked in the same transaction as the release. An asset charge is refunded automatically on a definite provider failure — but an ambiguous outcome is different: the charge is retained and retry is disabled, to stop a duplicate render being produced and billed, and it is cleared by a named human with reconciliation rights rather than automatically. An ambiguous supplier outcome is never retried blindly either; it stops the run.

The whole fee waterfall

If the answer above raises a question about your own budget, that is the sort of thing a forty-five minute working session is for.

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the rest of the questions

148 questions, grouped by subject

Every question answered anywhere on this site sits in one of 21 groups, and appears in exactly one of them. This is one.

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