Helium 10 pricing, read tab by tab — and the fee that scales with you

The numbers, and which tab each one comes from

Every figure below was read directly from Helium 10's own pricing page on 20 August 2026. The page has a billing toggle, and almost every disagreement you will find between one roundup and another traces back to two writers reading different sides of it.

• Platinum — $129/month billed monthly, or $99/month on annual billing.
• Diamond — $359/month on the pay-monthly tab; $279/month if you commit for the year.
• Enterprise — from $1,499/month, quoted on annual billing.

The annual tab is a genuine discount, not a rounding artefact: $99 against $129 and $279 against $359 are real reductions, and the page states the yearly saving alongside each. There is no free trial advertised on the page as we read it.

That is the easy half. Print those six numbers and you have written the same article as everyone else ranking for this query. The number that will actually decide your bill is on the same page and is quoted almost nowhere.

The sentence most pricing roundups skip

On Helium 10's pricing page, attached to the Diamond tier, sits this line: "Diamond plan customers incur a 2% management fee on PPC spend managed through Helium 10 Ads."

Two things follow from it that change how you should read the whole comparison.

First, advertising is a Diamond-tier capability. If you were planning to buy Platinum because the research tools are what you wanted and you would "also do some ads in there", the ads part is not in that box. The step from $99 to $279 on annual billing is the step that unlocks it.

Second, and more importantly, the subscription stops being the price once ads are running. At $10,000 of monthly managed spend the fee is $200 — comparable to the subscription itself. At $50,000 it is $1,000 a month, which is roughly three and a half times the Diamond line. At $200,000 it is $4,000 a month and the subscription has become a rounding error. We could not find a published ceiling on that fee, and no threshold below which it stops applying appears on the page.

None of this is hidden. Helium 10 publishes it plainly, which is more than several vendors in this category do. It simply does not survive the trip into third-party pricing articles, because a fee that varies is harder to put in a table than a fee that does not.

Percentage of ad spend is how this category prices — ours included

It would be easy to turn the paragraph above into an attack. It would also be dishonest, because Dr. PPC charges 3% of ad spend on top of a $300 monthly fee, and we are not going to argue against a model we use.

What is worth saying is that the model is normal at the top of this market rather than exotic. Helium 10, the largest seller-software company in the category, prices its advertising product this way. SellerApp's published agency arrangement starts at $300 plus a percentage of ad spend in a 0.5% to 2.5% band. Teikametrics adds a percentage above a spend threshold. Perpetua's growth tier is a monthly fee plus a percentage. When four vendors who compete with each other independently land on the same structure, the structure is not the problem.

The honest arguments to have about it are narrower and more useful:

• Is the percentage published? Helium 10's is. Ours is. Some competitors quote theirs on a call, which is a fair commercial choice but leaves you unable to model your own costs before you talk to someone.
• What is it charged on? Spend managed through the tool is not the same as total account spend. Ask which campaigns count.
• Is it capped? This is the one that matters most and is asked least. Dr. PPC's total is capped at $2,500 a month, which means the fee stops growing at a spend level where an uncapped percentage keeps climbing. We could find no published cap on Helium 10's 2%.

And the fairest counter-argument to all of it: Seller Labs' Ad Genius does not charge a percentage of ad spend at all — it bands a flat fee by revenue instead. If your ad 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 the numbers rather than take anyone's word for it, including ours.

Run it at your own spend

The reason this comparison gets written badly is that the honest answer is "it depends what you spend", and a static table cannot say that. So here is a live one. Move the slider to your real monthly Amazon ad spend and watch the lines move.

The first thing it shows is about Helium 10: the 2% overtakes the subscription at about $14,000 of managed spend, and from there the subscription stops being the price in any meaningful sense.

The second thing it shows is about us, and we would rather you heard it here than found it yourself. On fee arithmetic alone, Diamond on annual billing is the cheaper of the two lines across almost the whole realistic range — at $25,000 of monthly spend it is a few hundred dollars a month less, and it stays ahead until somewhere around $110,000 of monthly spend, where our cap binds and theirs does not exist. If your decision is purely "which invoice is smaller", the answer for most accounts on this page is not Dr. PPC.

We publish that because the comparison is not really between two fee lines. Diamond is a subscription plus your team's hours. Dr. PPC is a fee with the hours inside it. The only version of this calculation that means anything adds a realistic cost for whoever is going to sit in the console every week — and once you do that, the two columns stop being comparable in the way a table implies.

What no subscription price includes: the hours

Whatever tier you land on, Helium 10 is software you operate. The fee buys capability, not attention. Someone on your side still has to open it, read it, decide, and act — every week, indefinitely.

It is worth being concrete about what that workload actually looks like, because it is the part nobody prices. Measured across the 47 brands we manage — 3,086,624 search terms that took a click, Amazon search data from 1 May 2026 onward — 48.5% of all search spend went to terms that produced zero orders: $4,962,963 of $10,243,379.

The distribution underneath is the part that decides what a tool can do about it. 83% of every search term that took a click produced no sale, and at the other end 0.9% of 891,585 terms carried 80% of the sales. The losers are the population, and the winners are a rounding error that happens to be the business.

Now consider what a rules engine can do with that shape. Rules are excellent at the problem you can describe in advance — pause anything over an ACoS threshold with more than N clicks and no sales. But when four terms in five are losers, a threshold that reaches most of them also negates the ones that have not converted yet, and a threshold that spares those leaves nearly half the budget where it is. This is not a criticism of Helium 10's automation specifically; it is the ceiling on the whole category of tools that hand you conditions to configure. The work is not the rule. The work is the tens of thousands of decisions the rule was never written for.

And there are two calculations no tier makes for you at any price. The first decides whether a keyword can be bought at all: the ratio of cost-per-click to selling price. The teaching example we use across our pod is a product selling at $10 against a click costing $2.70, which needs roughly a 30% conversion rate just to break even. Conversion rates that high exist and they are rare, so on a low-priced product in an expensive category the honest conclusion is often that the term cannot be bought profitably at any bid — and the fix is a bundle, a higher price point or a different keyword, not sharper bid management. It is arithmetic rather than insight, and it is the step most often skipped before a campaign launches.

The second decides what to do after a change. In our own accounts we judge every spend change on the ACOS of the money we added, not on the account's blended ACOS, because a blended figure moves slowly and hides the decision you actually made. On one account an added $930 came back at a 22.35% marginal ACOS while the blended rate sat well above it — the right move was to add more, and the blended number would have said stop. Neither of those is a feature on a pricing page. Both are questions somebody has to remember to ask, every week, for as long as the account runs.

Read the contract, not the feature grid

Every comparison article about this category, ours included until now, argues about features and monthly rates. The document that will actually cost you money if you get it wrong is the terms of service, and almost nobody reads it before signing.

Quartile's published Terms of Service are a useful illustration of why it matters — a one-year term that renews automatically, sixty days' written notice required to stop it, and fees payable in advance and non-refundable. That is a perfectly ordinary enterprise software contract. It is also a structure where a decision you make in month two is binding through month fourteen, and not one page ranking for "Quartile pricing" mentions it.

So before you commit to any vendor here, including us, get written answers to these:

• Which billing tab am I actually on, and what is the term? An annual discount is a twelve-month commitment wearing a monthly price tag.
• Does it auto-renew, and how much notice must I give? Sixty days before a renewal date means diarising it eleven months from now.
• Are fees refundable if I leave mid-term? Usually not. Know that going in rather than discovering it.
• How do I get my data out? Historic keyword harvests, negative lists and bid history are yours in principle. Ask what format they arrive in and how long it takes.
• Will I get written notice before a fee changes? Ask every vendor this, including Dr. PPC. A percentage-of-spend arrangement in particular should never move without notice in writing.
• What exactly is the percentage charged on? Total account spend, or only spend routed through the platform.

A vendor that answers all six cleanly is telling you something real about how they operate. So is one that will not put the answers in writing.

Where Dr. PPC and Orbit sit next to Helium 10

The like-for-like comparison to Helium 10 is not Dr. PPC — it is Orbit, our software suite, which covers account analytics, search-term and profitability tracking and the Dr. PPC Console. Orbit is included at no additional charge with Dr. PPC, so the software line in your budget goes to zero rather than to a competitor. If your team is happy driving software and simply wants better account-level analytics than a research suite provides, Orbit is the honest recommendation and you can stop reading here.

Dr. PPC is the tier above that, and it is a different purchase: not a dashboard you operate but an agent that reads the whole account, writes a strategy per product against that product's real economics, and proposes each change with the evidence behind it, a measurement plan and a rollback trigger attached before anything runs. You choose the autonomy level — every change waiting on a human click, routine changes automatic with larger ones queued, or fully autonomous inside guardrails you set. Inventory risk, pricing, new launches and creative always come to a human regardless of that setting.

It is $300 a month plus 3% of ad spend, capped, month-to-month, with the first 30 days free. There is no annual tab to misread and no notice period to diarise.

Dr. PPC is built by Full Circle, which has managed more than $500M in revenue across 100+ brands, with 70+ brands live across the Full Circle and reMKTR group today. If the constraint you are actually feeling is inventory and fees rather than advertising — stockouts eating rank, or reimbursements you have never chased — Dr. Stock is the sibling product for that, and it is a better first purchase than any ad tool when the ads are fine and the supply chain is not.