Adtomic pricing: the product is Helium 10 Ads, and the price is a tier plus a percentage

What Helium 10 publishes today

Read directly from Helium 10's own pricing page on 20 August 2026, with each figure labelled by billing tab because that page has a toggle and most disagreements between articles trace back to it:

• Platinum — $129/month billed monthly, or $99/month on annual billing. The advertising product is not included at this tier.
• Diamond — $359/month billed monthly, or $279/month on annual billing.
• Enterprise — from $1,499/month, quoted on annual billing.

Two sentences on that page decide the whole question. The first: the advertising product is available in Diamond plans. The second: Diamond plan customers incur a 2% management fee on PPC spend managed through Helium 10 Ads.

So there is no standalone advertising subscription to price. There is a tier that contains it and a percentage that runs alongside it. We could find no published threshold below which the percentage does not apply, and no published ceiling above which it stops growing.

It is worth saying plainly that publishing the percentage at all puts Helium 10 ahead of a good part of this category. Pacvue, Intentwise, Quartile and Criteo publish no rate you can model against. A percentage you can read on a page is a percentage you can put in a spreadsheet, which is the whole reason this article can exist.

The two old numbers, and the surprise when you actually run them

Search this topic and you will meet two figures repeatedly: a monthly add-on price of around $199 for the advertising module, and a 2% fee that applies only to spend above $10,000 a month. Neither appears on Helium 10's pricing page today.

The obvious article to write here is the gotcha: the price you were quoted is gone, and the new one is worse. We started writing it, then did the arithmetic, and it is not true. Here is what actually happens when you compare the structure people believe they are buying against the one that is published.

Take the circulating structure — a $199 monthly module fee plus 2% on spend above $10,000 — and the published structure, 2% on managed spend from the first dollar, and price the advertising component at three spend levels:

• At $10,000 a month: the circulating structure is $199 + $0 = $199. Two per cent from the first dollar is $200.
• At $30,000: $199 + $400 = $599, against $600.
• At $100,000: $199 + $1,800 = $1,999, against $2,000.

They are within a dollar of each other at every level, because $199 is almost exactly 2% of $10,000. A flat fee plus a percentage above a threshold, and a percentage from the first dollar, are the same line when the flat fee equals the percentage of the threshold. The repackaging barely moved the arithmetic.

We are publishing that because confidence in a gotcha is a warning sign rather than a reward, and we have been wrong in exactly this way before. What genuinely changed is not the rate. It is the gate — advertising now sits inside a tier rather than being bought alongside one — and that is where the real money is.

The tier step is the actual price of the module

If you are already paying for Diamond because you want the research tools and the multi-account headroom, the advertising module costs you the percentage and nothing else. That is genuinely efficient, and it is the strongest thing to say about this pricing.

If you are on Platinum, the picture is different, and this is the calculation nobody publishes. On annual billing the step from $99 to $279 is $180 a month, or $2,160 a year, before a single dollar of percentage. Add the 2% and express the whole thing as an effective rate on your advertising spend:

• At $10,000 of monthly managed spend — $180 + $200 = $380, an effective 3.80% of spend.
• At $30,000 — $180 + $600 = $780, or 2.60%.
• At $100,000 — $180 + $2,000 = $2,180, or 2.18%.
• At $200,000 — $180 + $4,000 = $4,180, or 2.09%.

The all-in rate starts near 3.8% and decays toward 2% as spend grows, because the fixed step gets diluted. That single curve tells a small advertiser and a large one two completely different stories about the same published price, and it is the reason "Helium 10 Ads costs 2%" is true and incomplete at the same time.

The practical implication: if advertising is the only reason you would move from Platinum to Diamond, price the step and the percentage together and compare that total against a standalone bidding tool. Scale Insights, for instance, publishes a ladder starting at $78/month billed monthly with no ad-spend component at all on those plans. For a seller at $10,000 of spend who does not want the research tools, that is a materially different bill.

Run it at your own spend, and where we lose

The calculator below carries only published figures. Move the slider to your real monthly Amazon ad spend and watch the lines separate.

Here is the concession, at the top rather than buried. Once the tier step is included, our capped fee only overtakes the Helium 10 route at roughly $116,000 of monthly ad spend. Below that — which is most accounts reading this page — the smaller invoice is theirs, not ours. At $30,000 a month the difference is several hundred dollars in their favour. We would rather you heard that here than worked it out afterwards and wondered what else we had left out.

What that comparison leaves out on both sides is the operating cost. A Diamond subscription plus a 2% fee buys capability. Somebody on your side still opens it, reads the search term report, writes and re-tunes the rules, and notices the things no rule covers. Dr. PPC's $300 a month plus 3% of ad spend, capped at $2,500 a month, has that work inside it — an AI agent doing it daily with operators from a $500M+ Amazon team supervising.

Put a realistic hourly cost on the person who will do that work and the two columns stop being comparable in the way a table implies. Leave it out and the software column always wins, which is precisely why every comparison article that ignores it reaches the same conclusion.

One more way to size the percentage against something real, and it is worth doing on the media budget rather than on the fee. Across the 47 brands we manage, 48.5% of all search spend went to terms that returned no orders — $4,962,963 of $10,243,379 in Amazon search data from 1 May 2026 onward. On a $30,000-a-month account, one percentage point of management fee is $300 a month. The share of that same budget landing on terms that produce nothing is, on our book, closer to $14,000. Both are worth arguing about. Only one of them is where the money actually is, and it is not the one on the pricing page.

The two questions that decide what the percentage actually costs

A published percentage is only half a price. Two details move the final number more than the rate does, and both are worth getting in writing from any vendor including us.

What is it charged on? "PPC spend managed through Helium 10 Ads" is a narrower basis than total account spend, and narrower is better for you. If some campaigns run outside the tool, on the face of the published wording they are outside the fee. That is a meaningful distinction and it is worth confirming exactly which campaigns count, because the difference between managed spend and total spend on a partially migrated account can be a factor of two.

Is there a ceiling? This is the question asked least and worth most. An uncapped percentage is a fee that grows without limit as you succeed. At $50,000 of monthly spend 2% is $1,000; at $250,000 it is $5,000; at $1,000,000 it is $20,000 a month. We could find no published cap. That is not a criticism — plenty of vendors do not cap — but it is the difference between a cost you can forecast and one you cannot.

Dr. PPC's total is capped at $2,500 a month, which is the argument we would make for our own structure rather than any argument against theirs. Percentage-of-spend is how the category leader prices its advertising product, and it is how we price ours; the useful debate is about the ceiling and the basis, not the model.

And the fairest counter to our own position: some competitors charge no percentage of ad spend at all, banding a flat fee by revenue or by catalogue size instead. If your advertising spend is large relative to your revenue, a flat model genuinely beats a percentage model and no amount of arguing about caps changes that arithmetic. Run it rather than take anyone's word for it, ours included.

Read the contract, not the feature grid

Three commitment questions matter specifically when a variable fee sits on top of an annual subscription, and none of them appear in a feature comparison.

• What happens in Q4? A percentage of spend rises exactly when your spend does. If November triples your advertising, the fee triples with it. Ask how and when it is invoiced, and whether it is calculated monthly in arrears — you want no surprises in a month when cash is already tight.
• What happens if you downgrade mid-term? The discount that takes Diamond from $359 to $279 is attached to annual billing, so the advertising decision and a twelve-month software commitment get made together. Ask what dropping to Platinum in month four actually costs.
• What happens to campaigns if the subscription lapses? Rules stop, but campaigns keep spending. Confirm what state your account is left in, and export your negative keyword lists before you ever need them.

Beyond those, the general list for every vendor including us: get written notice of fee changes in advance; confirm the term, renewal mechanism and notice period, then diary the notice date the week you sign; and ask what data leaves with you on exit.

For scale, the heaviest terms published openly in this category belong to Quartile — a one-year initial term renewing automatically for successive one-year periods, written notice of non-renewal required at least sixty days before expiry, fees due in advance and described as non-cancellable and non-refundable, and in-account termination available only during an initial sixty-day evaluation window. That they publish it is genuinely to their credit, and it is quoted by essentially no ranking page. Terms like these decide more of your risk than any feature list, and they are the least-read documents in the category.

Who this pricing suits, and where Dr. PPC fits

This is good pricing for you if you were buying Diamond anyway — for the research tools, for the five additional users, or for the ten connected Amazon accounts. In that case the advertising engine arrives as incremental capability at 2% of managed spend with no second platform fee, and that is one of the better deals in Amazon software.

It is expensive for you if you are on Platinum, spend under about $15,000 a month, and want advertising automation only. The $180 monthly step plus the percentage produces an effective rate near 3.8% of spend at $10,000 a month, and a standalone tool priced on catalogue size will usually beat that for the single job.

Where Dr. PPC sits is a different category of purchase and we would rather be clear about it than win a shortlist under false pretences. We charge $300 a month plus 3% of ad spend, capped at $2,500 a month, month-to-month, with the first 30 days free and Orbit included. That buys the work, not the tooling — the rule tuning, the search term triage, the noticing, done daily. Below roughly $116,000 of monthly spend, ours is the larger invoice. Whether it is the larger cost depends on what the hours are worth to you.

Two places to go next if they describe you. If you want the product judged rather than priced — what the rules engine does well and where it runs out — read our review of Helium 10 Ads. And if you are choosing the tier rather than the module, our Helium 10 review covers the seat and connected-account limits that usually decide it.

Dr. PPC and Orbit are products of Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands.