Once your Amazon ad spend passes a few thousand dollars a month, someone usually suggests handing it off. There are three ways to do that: hire an agency, pay for software that runs the ads with some human help, or use a self-serve tool and stay in control yourself. They're priced differently, and they're good at different things.
The three options
| Agency | Managed software | Self-serve tool | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who makes changes | An account manager, often with their own software | Software, with a strategist checking in | Software, on rules you approve |
| Usual pricing | 10% to 20% of spend, often with a minimum | A monthly fee plus a percentage of spend | A flat fee by spend band |
| Cost at $15k a month | About $1,500 to $3,000 | Often $500 to $1,000+ | Roughly $250 to $450 |
| What you see | Monthly reports | A dashboard and reports | Every change, as it happens |
Ranges are from published pricing pages and common agency terms as of October 2026. See our pricing page for the specific tools we compared.
What an agency is good at
- Strategy and launches. A good team will plan a product launch, a catalog restructure or a new marketplace better than any rule set.
- Creative. Brand store pages, video ads and listing copy are still mostly human work.
- Your time. If nobody on your team has hours for ads, an agency buys them back.
Where agencies and managed software fall short
- Percentage pricing works against you. When the fee is a share of spend, the provider earns more when you spend more, whether or not that spend is profitable.
- You often can't see the work. A monthly report shows results, not decisions. You rarely see which bids changed, when, and why.
- Daily batches. Many setups change bids once a day, in one run. On our own account, about 80% of logged changes landed in the same two-hour window each afternoon.
- Housekeeping slips. Negating harvested terms, cutting search terms that never convert and keeping campaigns from overlapping are tedious. On our account, terms served by two or more of our own campaigns took about two-thirds of search spend. More in our negative keywords guide.
What software is good at
Software is good at the repetitive work: reading every search term every day, pacing budgets, adjusting bids in small steps, and never forgetting the negative-back step. It costs the same whether you spend more or less, so it has no reason to push spend up.
Where software falls short is judgment. It doesn't know you're about to run out of stock, or that a product is being discontinued, unless you tell it.
Questions to ask before you sign
- Can I see every change you make, with the reason, as it happens?
- How often do bids and budgets change? Once a day, or through the day?
- When you move a search term into exact match, do you negate it where it came from?
- Are targets set by product margin, or one ACoS for the whole account?
- Is your fee a percentage of spend? If so, what stops you from raising spend?
- If I leave, do my campaigns stay exactly as they are?
- Do you run any ads for me outside my own Amazon Ads account, like DSP in your own seat? Can I see that data?
A common middle path
Many brands end up with software for the daily work and an agency or freelancer for a few hours a month of strategy and creative. You pay for judgment where it matters and stop paying a percentage for work a rule can do.
That's the gap Adtender was built for: the daily work, done in the open, at a flat price.
See every change, and why
Adtender is in private beta, running on our own brand first.
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