Amazon PPC software compared by what you can actually verify

Feature tables are not the problem

Every roundup in this category compares the same ten things: bid automation, search-term harvesting, dayparting, bulk editing, marketplace coverage, ad-type support. Fine work, and largely settled — most serious tools now do most of it, and the gaps that remain are narrow enough that a two-week trial tells you more than any table.

The thing those roundups handle badly is money. Prices in this category move, disappear behind demo forms, or appear as a base plus an unnamed variable. So we did the boring version of the comparison: on 20 August 2026 we opened each vendor's own pricing page and wrote down exactly what was on it. Everything below comes from that read, in the currency and tier the vendor printed. Verify before you budget — several of these will have changed by the time you read this.

What each vendor actually publishes

Full price, no asterisk. Sellerboard puts four US-dollar tiers on its home page rather than a separate pricing URL: Standard at $19 a month billed monthly or $15 billed annually, rising to Enterprise at $79 monthly or $63 annual, with a one-month trial and no card. Scale Insights prints a per-ASIN ladder in dollars — Scale 5 at $78 a month, Scale 20 at $178, Scale 50 at $388, Scale 100 at $688 — alongside an unlimited-ASIN option billed at 1% of ad spend, and a 30-day trial with no card. Both let you know your first-year cost before you talk to anybody.

Price plus a stated percentage. Teikametrics lists Essentials at $179 a month monthly, $149 annual, for accounts up to $10K a month in ad spend, then Advanced and Enterprise as custom pricing plus 3% of ad spend over $10K. Helium 10 lists Platinum at $129 monthly, $99 yearly; Diamond at $359 monthly, $279 yearly; Enterprise from $1,499 monthly billed annually — and says on the same page that Diamond customers carry a 2% management fee on PPC spend managed through Helium 10 Ads. AiHello lists $199 a month per marketplace plus 2% of ad spend, with advanced modules such as repricing and budgeting at $10 per SKU per month each. You may or may not like these numbers, but you can model them.

Price plus a percentage they do not name. Perpetua lists Essentials at $695 a month for accounts under $10k monthly spend, Growth at $695 a month "+ % of ad spend" above that, and Premium as custom above $500k. Adbrew lists Standard at $799 a month "or % of ad spend, whichever is greater", for accounts up to $500K of monthly spend. In neither case is the percentage printed anywhere on the page.

No price at all. Pacvue has no pricing page — the URL is a 404 and the home page routes to a demo booking. Intentwise is the same. Quartile has none either: quartile.com/pricing now redirects to the home page, so there is no pricing page left to read. What Quartile does put in writing is in its terms of service — tiers set by your aggregate monthly ad spend, the number of advertising platforms it manages for you and the service level you agree, with the amounts recorded in the order form. That is a structure, not a rate, and it is more than most quote-only vendors commit to on paper.

The unnamed percentage is the number that matters

Sellers negotiate the subscription and accept the variable rate, which gets the priority exactly backwards. The subscription is fixed. The variable line grows with the thing you are paying the vendor to grow.

Run it at $100,000 a month of ad spend, which is a normal size for a brand shopping this category seriously:

• One percentage point is $1,000 a month — $12,000 a year.
• Two points is $24,000 a year. Three is $36,000.

Against a $695 or $799 monthly subscription, the undisclosed line is the bill. A vendor who prints "+ % of ad spend" and stops has left the largest single number in your contract to a sales conversation. That is not an argument against charging on spend — we charge on spend, Helium 10 charges 2% on Diamond, Teikametrics charges 3% over $10K, and SellerApp's own pricing page puts agency pricing at a starting $300 plus 0.5%–2.5% of Amazon ad spend. It is an argument for making every vendor state four things in writing before you sign: the rate, what spend it applies to, whether it is capped, and what triggers a change to it.

A vendor publishing no price is a finding, not a gap in our research. It usually means the price is set by what your account looks like, which is legitimate for enterprise software and useless if you are trying to compare three options on a Tuesday afternoon.

Different tools genuinely win here

This is not a category with one answer, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

• Sellerboard — best if what you actually need is profit visibility rather than bid automation. Cheapest published price in the category by a wide margin, and honest about being an analytics tool with ads attached.
• Scale Insights — best deterministic rules engine for a defined catalogue. The per-ASIN ladder means you pay for what you automate, and the 30-day no-card trial is the most generous way in.
• Helium 10 Ads — best if you already pay for the research suite. Consolidating two subscriptions is a real saving and the keyword bench underneath the ads module is unmatched.
• Teikametrics — best if Walmart matters as much as Amazon, and it publishes both halves of its price, which most of its peers do not.
• Perpetua — best hands-off goal-based automation with a clean interface. Get the percentage in writing first.
• Adbrew — best for agencies running many accounts, and one of the few covering DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud alongside sponsored ads.
• Pacvue — best at genuine enterprise scale and multi-retailer reporting. Expect a procurement process, not a checkout.

Where Orbit and Dr. PPC sit in this

Software-to-software, the honest comparison is Orbit, our suite: sales and advertising analytics, search-term and campaign profitability, keyword and traffic tracking, inventory, finance, ASIN profitability, and BSR, buy box, price and fee trackers. That is the shelf most of the vendors above rent monthly. Orbit is included with Dr. PPC at no additional charge, so the subscription line drops out of the comparison and the argument becomes the one that matters: who does the work.

Dr. PPC is the tier above the software. Fable 5 reads the whole ad account, writes a strategy per product against that brand's real economics, then proposes each change with the evidence behind it, a measurement plan and a rollback trigger. You choose the autonomy level — every change awaiting a human click, routine changes automatic with bigger ones queued, or fully autonomous inside agreed guardrails. Inventory risk, pricing, new launches and creative always come to a human regardless of the setting.

$300/month plus 3% of ad spend, capped, month-to-month, first 30 days free. That is a higher rate than several tools on this page and it should be — none of them are doing the work. It is published, it has a ceiling, and it is on this page rather than behind a demo form. Full Circle, which operates it, has $500M+ in managed revenue across 100+ brands.

One redirect worth making: if your sponsored-ads efficiency has flattened and the ceiling is reach rather than bidding, no tool on this list changes that. Dr. DSP is the conversation instead.