Performance creative agencies price in five ways: per asset, by production subscription, on a strategy and production retainer, bundled with media for a flat fee, or bundled with media as a percentage of ad spend. Published 2026 prices run from $1,600 a month for an AI video subscription to $15,000 a month and more for creative retainers, and the gap is mostly explained by what each price leaves out. The comparison that matters is not cost per asset. It is cost per new concept your account can actually test and read, which is capped by your media budget, not by the size of the package.
This guide covers what providers publish, what each pricing model rewards and where it breaks, the cost that sits outside every creative quote, and a worked example that converts four very different quotes into one comparable number. It is about paying for the creative engine specifically. If you are pricing a full user acquisition agency, our guide to mobile app user acquisition agency pricing covers management fees and the costs around them, and our breakdown of Meta ads agency pricing covers media management on its own. Worked examples are hypothetical and labelled as such. Every published price below was read from the provider's own page in October 2026.
What performance creative providers actually publish
Most creative agencies do not publish a price. The ones that do are mostly selling something narrower than a full performance creative service, which is exactly why their prices look different. Here is what is on the record.
| Provider | What it sells | Published price | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| EditClub | AI video production subscription | $1,600, $2,400 or $4,000 a month for about 60, 90 or 180 videos. Six videos per request (three videos, three hook or CTA versions) | Positions itself for DTC brands spending $10K+ a month on Meta. "No cameras. No creators." Cancel any time. Media buying not included. |
| Admiral Media, AI Creative Factory | AI video batches from a UA agency | €10,000 for 20 video ads, €16,000 for 40, €29,000 for 80 (€500, €400 and €363 per video) | Management fee is separate and not published. The same company's pricing guide gives different figures, covered below. |
| Superside | Creative subscription (general, not app specialist) | From a $15,000 monthly minimum on an annual term, plus a $1,000 monthly software fee. Dedicated teams from $30,000 a month on a 12-month term | Sold as a monthly budget spent across projects rather than a fixed asset count. |
| Insense | Creator marketplace platform | Brand plan from $500 a month billed quarterly ($400 a month annually). Creator payments extra, plus a 10% marketplace fee. UGC from $100 per video | You brief, select and manage creators. A tool, not an agency. |
| Darkroom (pricing guide) | Growth agency for consumer brands | Performance creative $5,000 to $15,000 a month in three tiers; "some agencies" charge $150 to $500 per static and $500 to $2,000 per video | A seller's estimate of the market. No methodology published. |
| The Social Outline | Performance creative and Meta management for apps | Flat fee from £1,500 a month (up to £20k ad spend), from £3,250 (up to £75k), custom above | Creative strategy, production, Meta campaign management and reporting included. No fixed ad quota. £3,000 minimum monthly ad spend. |
Sources: EditClub, Admiral Media engagement and pricing, Superside pricing, Insense pricing, Darkroom's 2026 agency cost guide and our own pricing page.
Two things stand out. First, the six rows are six different products: an editing service, a batch production line, a design subscription, a creator marketplace, an agency's estimate of the market and a combined media and creative fee. Ranking them on price would be ranking a hammer against a builder. Second, even one company's published numbers do not always agree. Admiral Media's AI creative pricing guide says its AI creative retainers typically run €4,000 to €21,500 a month, that the €4,000 tier delivers around 20 AI videos, and that per-asset pricing starts at €200 per AI video. Its pricing page lists 20 video ads for €10,000. Both may be accurate for different scopes, but a buyer cannot tell from the pages which applies, which is the general lesson: a published price is a starting point for a question, not an answer.
The five pricing models and what each one rewards
Every pricing model pays the supplier for something. Knowing what it pays for tells you what you will get more of.
Per asset
A fixed price per static, per video, per edit. It rewards output. It is the most transparent model on paper and the right one when you already know exactly what you need made: your strategist has written the briefs and you are buying production capacity. It breaks when the supplier is also expected to think, because thinking is not a line item and nobody is paid to do more of it. It also invites you to count hook variants and resizes as if they were new ideas.
Production subscription
A monthly fee for a queue of requests, often with unlimited revisions and a rough output ceiling. EditClub's $1,600 plan, for example, works through about ten requests a month at one active request at a time. It rewards throughput and is genuinely cheap per video, because AI tools have pushed the marginal cost of an edit towards zero. The catch is that a request is only as good as the brief inside it. A subscription multiplies whatever thinking you bring and adds little of its own.
Strategy and production retainer
A monthly fee for research, concepting, production and reporting at an agreed scope. This is what most people mean by a performance creative agency, and it is where Darkroom's $5,000 to $15,000 range sits. It rewards the agency for keeping you as a client, which is aligned with your interests as long as you can see whether the work is producing winners. If the agency does not run your media, it also needs a fast route to your account data, or the strategy is written from a monthly summary.
Bundled with media, flat fee
One fee for creative and campaign management together, usually stepped by spend band. It rewards closing the loop: the people who make the ad also launch it and read it, so the next brief is written from the account rather than from a report. The risk is that a strong media team can hide a weak creative function, or the reverse, so ask to see both. This is how we price, and we explain why further down.
Bundled with media, percentage of spend
A share of ad spend that covers management and some creative. It scales automatically, which is its strength, because a bigger account genuinely needs more creative. It also rewards spend itself, and creative need is not driven by budget alone. Fatigue speed, audience breadth and the number of markets matter at least as much. A percentage with a cap, or a flat fee stepped by band, keeps the scaling and removes the incentive. Admiral Media's guide cites a rule of thumb of 10% to 20% of paid media budget for creative production, without naming a source, which is a reasonable sanity check on total creative cost but not a reason to tie the fee to spend.
You will also see performance bonuses layered on top of a retainer, paid when ROAS or CPA beats a target. For creative specifically we would be careful: creative sits in a chain that includes your paywall, onboarding and media buying, so a bonus pays for outcomes the creative supplier only partly controls. Our guide on how to hire a performance creative agency covers the wider selection criteria.
Concept count vs deliverable count: what the quote is counting
The single biggest source of confusion in creative quotes is the unit. Sixty videos sounds like sixty ideas. EditClub's own plan describes each request as six videos, three videos with three hook or CTA versions, so its sixty-video plan is about ten briefs. That is an honest description and a useful one, because it makes the real unit visible. Admiral Media's AI UGC page puts it plainly too: "A new edit or resize is not automatically a new creative concept." Our own UGC service briefs five hook variants per video.
None of that is a problem. Variants are how you get the most out of a concept that works. The problem is paying concept prices for variants, or buying sixty variants when what the account needs is six new reasons to care. We set out the distinction, and why Meta's delivery treats near-identical ideas as one ad, in our comparison of performance creative agencies for mobile apps and in creative diversity versus volume. For pricing purposes, the rule is simple: ask every supplier how many distinct concepts the quote buys, and how they define one.
The cost no creative quote includes: media to read each concept
A concept is not worth anything until it has been tested with enough delivery to tell a winner from noise. That test is paid for in media, not in the creative fee, and it puts a ceiling on how many new concepts a month are worth buying at all.
Our working rule, set out in full in our guide to Meta ads creative testing budgets, is to hold back roughly 15% of spend for testing and to give each new concept enough budget for twenty to thirty conversions before judging it. At a £2 to £3 cost per install that is about £500 a concept. Put the two together and your spend sets your capacity.
| Monthly Meta spend | Testing budget at 15% | New concepts you can read a month |
|---|---|---|
| £3,000 | £450 | About 1 |
| £10,000 | £1,500 | About 3 |
| £25,000 | £3,750 | About 7 |
| £50,000 | £7,500 | About 15 |
| £100,000 | £15,000 | About 30 |
These are rules of thumb from our own accounts, not a published benchmark, and the per-concept figure moves with your costs. A sub-£1 CPI, common on Android and in cheaper markets, roughly halves it. Judging concepts on trials or purchases rather than installs raises it, because each of those events costs more. Variations of a proven winner can be judged faster and more cheaply, so they sit on top of these numbers rather than inside them.
The implication for buying creative is blunt. On a £10,000 account, a package of sixty videos still produces about three readable new concepts a month. Everything beyond that is either variation inventory, which is useful, or untested ideas that age on a hard drive, which is not. Our creative refresh calculator estimates the replacement rate your spend and audience need, which is the other side of the same calculation.
Four quotes, one app: a worked example
This app and all four quotes are hypothetical. The app spends £25,000 a month on Meta at a £2.50 cost per install, so on the rule above its testing budget is £3,750 and it can read about seven new concepts a month. Three of the four quotes do not include media management, so we add a hypothetical £2,500 a month for a freelance media buyer to make them comparable.
Cost per readable concept = (creative fee + anything else you must buy to run it) ÷ the smaller of concepts delivered and concepts your testing budget can read
| Quote | Monthly fee | New concepts | Readable at £25k | Still to buy | Cost per readable concept |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Per-asset studio | £6,960 (12 videos at £400, 18 statics at £120) | 6, from briefs you write | 6 | Media management (£2,500) | £1,577 |
| B. AI video subscription | £1,300 (about 60 videos from 10 requests) | Up to 10, from briefs you write | 7 | Media management (£2,500) | £543 |
| C. Strategy and production retainer | £7,500 (research, 5 concepts, 20 assets, reporting) | 5 | 5 | Media management (£2,500) | £2,000 |
| D. Media and creative bundled, 15% of spend | £3,750 (Meta management plus 4 new concepts) | 4 | 4 | Nothing | £938 |
Every option also needs about £500 of test media per concept, so add that to each figure: it does not change the order, but it is a real £2,000 to £3,500 a month whose only job is to read creative. Four things fall out of the table.
- The subscription is cheapest, on one condition. At £543 per readable concept, quote B wins easily if all ten requests carry genuinely different ideas. If your briefs are mostly reworks of last month's winner and only two of the ten are new concepts, the same £3,800 buys two reads and the cost becomes £1,900 each, more than quote A. The price of a subscription is low because it charges for editing. The scarce input is the brief, and you are supplying it.
- Per asset is expensive for what it is. Quote A buys six concepts the account can read, but at £1,577 each it costs nearly three times the subscription and still relies on your briefs. It makes sense for specialist formats the cheaper options cannot produce, not as a default.
- The retainer is dearest per concept and the only one that brings its own thinking. Quote C costs £2,000 per readable concept, but research and briefs are inside the fee. Whether that is good value depends on hit rate: if its concepts win twice as often as briefs you would have written yourself, it is the cheapest source of winners on the page. Ask for evidence of hit rate, not a showreel.
- The bundle under-supplies this account. Quote D is good value at £938 per readable concept with the media included, but four concepts on an account that can read seven leaves capacity unused. The fix is not a different supplier, it is asking for the concept count to match the testing budget.
The general rule: buy as many new concepts as your media can read, pay for variants at variant prices, and make sure someone is responsible for the briefs. Cheap production with nobody writing distinct briefs is the most expensive option in the market, it just does not look like it on the invoice. The same logic, applied to AI video specifically, is in our breakdown of what AI UGC actually costs.
Hidden costs to check before you sign
The fee is the visible part. These are the lines that change the real cost of creative after the contract starts.
- Usage rights. Creator content is licensed, not bought outright, unless the contract says so. Insense's terms grant brands full digital rights once content is approved and paid for, while copyright stays with the creator. Our UGC contracts include 12 months of paid usage on Meta, TikTok and Google by default. Check the duration, the channels and whether whitelisting costs extra.
- Variants and resizes. Find out whether a hook variant or a 9:16 to 4:5 resize counts as a deliverable. If it does, a large asset count may describe very few ideas.
- Revisions and reshoots. Darkroom's starter tier includes one round of revisions per asset; EditClub offers unlimited revisions. Creator reshoots are rarely free, ours included, so ask what happens when a video underperforms.
- Localisation. Each new market multiplies the volume needed, as Admiral Media's guide notes. A quote for one market does not scale linearly to five.
- Ownership of source files. If you leave, can you keep iterating on what won? Get project files and templates in writing, including for AI-generated work.
- Commitment. Terms range from cancel any time (EditClub) and 30 days' notice (Admiral Media's guide) to an annual term (Superside). Ours is an initial three months, then rolling with 30 days' notice.
- Strategy and data access. If research and brief writing are not in the fee, someone on your team is doing them. Price that time. If the creative supplier cannot see your ad account, price the slower loop too.
What to budget for creative at your spend level
Putting testing capacity and pricing model together gives a rough guide by stage. Concept counts use the same rule of thumb as above.
| Monthly Meta spend | New concepts readable | What to buy | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
| £3,000 to £10,000 | 1 to 3 | One partner who writes the briefs and runs the media, or a founder who briefs well plus low-cost production. | Packages sold on asset counts. Forty assets on an account that can read two concepts is a storage problem. |
| £10,000 to £50,000 | 3 to 15 | Research-led concepting matched to test capacity, ideally with the same team reading the account. | Paying full asset prices for hook variants, and quotes that cannot say how many distinct concepts they include. |
| £50,000 and above | 15 to 30 or more | Strategy plus real production capacity. This is where a subscription or second supplier for variations alongside a strategy partner earns its place. | A boutique that becomes the bottleneck, and uncapped percentage-of-spend creative fees. |
If you are weighing an agency against building the function yourself, our comparison of agency and in-house creative teams costs the in-house side properly, including the on-costs most comparisons forget.
How we price, and when we are the wrong buy
Our pricing is published: a flat monthly fee from £1,500 for accounts spending up to £20,000 a month, from £3,250 up to £75,000, and custom above that. Every tier includes creative strategy, production, Meta campaign management and monthly reporting, and we work with a minimum of £3,000 a month in ad spend. We do not charge a percentage of spend, and we do not sell a fixed number of ads. Each month we research the customer, find the gaps in coverage across awareness levels and our creative framework, build against those gaps, launch and read the results, so the output follows the gaps rather than a quota. In the terms of this guide, we sell concepts that get read, with the variants and the media management attached.
That model is the wrong buy in three situations. If you already have a strong in-house strategist and media buyer, a production subscription will give you more output per pound. If you need playables, App Store creative or game trailers, a specialist is better, and our guide to mobile app creative agencies sorts them by surface. And if your spend is below £3,000 a month, the testing table above shows why no creative supplier can do much for you yet.
Where it fits, it looks like Steps & Beasts, an indie fitness app where heavy creative testing, AI UGC and onboarding changes came alongside a 1112% rise in revenue and 118% more active subscriptions. The onboarding work mattered as much as the ads, which is part of why we price creative and media together.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a performance creative agency cost in 2026?
Published prices span more than an order of magnitude because they buy different things. An AI video editing subscription such as EditClub starts at $1,600 a month. Admiral Media lists AI video batches from €10,000 for 20 ads. Superside's creative subscriptions start at a $15,000 monthly minimum on an annual term. Darkroom's 2026 guide puts performance creative retainers at $5,000 to $15,000 a month. Our own fee starts at £1,500 a month and also covers Meta campaign management. Compare quotes on cost per concept your account can actually test, not on the headline fee.
Is per-asset or retainer pricing better for performance creative?
Per-asset pricing suits teams that already write their own briefs and need extra production capacity for a known amount of work. A retainer suits teams that need the research, concepting and reading of results as well as the production. Per-asset quotes usually look cheaper because they leave out the strategy, so the honest comparison adds back the cost of whoever writes the briefs and reads the data.
Should a performance creative agency charge a percentage of ad spend?
It can work when creative is bundled with media buying, because the workload does rise with spend. The weakness is that creative need is driven by fatigue, audience breadth and the number of markets, which do not move in step with budget, and a percentage fee rewards spending more regardless of results. A flat fee stepped by spend band, or a percentage with a cap, keeps the scaling without the incentive problem.
What should be included in a performance creative retainer?
At minimum: customer research, concept development, production, hook and format variations, a stated number of revision rounds, platform resizes, usage rights for paid channels for a defined period, ownership of source files, and a written read of what won and why. If the agency does not run your media, add an agreed route to raw account data, because a creative team working from a monthly summary is guessing.
How many new creative concepts should I pay for each month?
No more than your media budget can test properly. Using our working rule of roughly 15% of spend held for testing and about £500 to read one concept at a £2 to £3 cost per install, an account spending £10,000 a month can read about three new concepts, £25,000 about seven and £50,000 about fifteen. Variations of proven winners are cheaper to judge and sit on top of that, but buying more new concepts than you can read produces inventory, not learning.
Why are AI creative subscriptions so much cheaper than agencies?
Because they price the part of the work that has become cheap. AI tools have pushed the marginal cost of an edit or a variant towards zero, so subscriptions can offer dozens of videos a month for under $2,000. What they generally do not include is the research and brief writing that decides whether those videos say anything new, or the media buying that tests them. If you supply those yourself, a subscription can be the best value on the market.
The short version
Performance creative pricing looks chaotic because the market sells different products under one name: editing capacity, production batches, design subscriptions, creator access and full creative strategy. Convert every quote to cost per new concept your account can actually read, add back whatever the quote leaves for you to supply, and cap the concept count at what your testing budget can fund. On that basis the cheapest invoice is sometimes the best buy and sometimes the most expensive one, and the difference is almost always who writes the briefs.
If your app is already spending on Meta and creative is the constraint, see how we run performance creative for mobile apps, check the tiers on our pricing page, and when the numbers make sense, apply to work with us.