The honest comparison
What an agency costs, and what you get for it
Agencies aren't a rip-off — they're a service with a price. This page lays out that price, what it buys, and where a platform built for owners genuinely wins. Including where it doesn't.
The maths
What management fees cost you a year
Move the slider to your ad budget. The fee is what you pay someone to press the buttons — it's on top of what you pay Google.
Typical agency management fee
$300–$1,500 /mo
On top of the $3,000 you pay Google.
AI PPC Manager
$49 /mo
Same $3,000 to Google. You keep the account.
$251–$1,451 a month stays in your business — roughly $3,012–$17,412 a year in management fees you no longer pay.
Agency figures are typical published ranges — commonly 10–20% of managed spend, or a flat retainer usually starting around $500–$1,500/month. They are not a quote, and every agency prices differently. This compares management fees only: we make no claim that any tool or agency will make your ads perform better, because that depends on your offer, your market and your budget — not on who clicks the buttons.
Side by side
Where each one actually wins
Two of these rows go to the agency. We'd rather you saw them here than found out later.
| Agency | AI PPC Manager | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly management fee | Commonly 10–20% of your ad spend, or a retainer from ~$500–$1,500 | A flat subscription, whatever you spend |
| Who owns the ad account | Often the agency. Leaving can mean losing the account and its history | You. It's your Google account — we deploy into it |
| Who owns the data | Their dashboards, their reports, their access | Yours, exportable, in your own account |
| What you're told | A monthly report of clicks, impressions and CTR | Whether you made money, against what a customer is worth to you |
| Speed of a small change | An email, then wait for someone to get to it | You approve it and it's live |
| Incentive when you spend more | On a percentage model, they earn more | We earn the same. We'll tell you to cut a channel |
| A human who knows your business | Yes — a real account manager, when they have time for you | No. It's software. That's the trade you're making |
| Complex builds (Shopping feeds, YouTube, big multi-brand accounts) | Well suited to it | Not our sweet spot — we're built for owner-run accounts |
Be honest with yourself
When you should hire an agency instead
If you're in one of these, we're not the right answer and we'd rather say so.
You want it off your plate entirely
This platform tells you what to do and needs a click. If you want to hand it over and never think about it, that's a person's job, not software's.
You're spending serious money
Past roughly $20k a month, a good specialist's fee is a rounding error against what their expertise can move. Hire one.
Your setup is genuinely complex
Multi-brand, multi-country, big Shopping feeds, YouTube production. We're built for owner-run accounts, not that.
The real trade
You're not buying cheaper ads. You're buying control.
We won’t claim your ads will perform better here than with a good agency. That depends on your offer, your market and your pricing — not on who logs into Google Ads.
What genuinely changes is this:
- The management fee stops leaving your business every month.
- The account, the data and the history stay yours — so you can leave us without losing anything.
- You get told whether you made money, in your own numbers, instead of a slide about click-through rate.
- Nothing changes in your account unless you approve it.
See the plan before you decide anything
Paste your website, get a full campaign plan free. No card, and nothing goes live until you say so.