Intentwise pricing: nothing published, three products in the quote

What is actually published, as of today

We looked for a rate card on 20 August 2026 and there is not one. The URL where a pricing page would live returns a 404, and the site's only commercial calls to action are "Schedule a discovery call" and "Request a demo". No tiers, no bands, no starting-from figure, no currency.

That is a finding, not an accusation. Selling through a conversation is an ordinary and defensible choice for software whose scope varies a great deal between one buyer and the next, and Intentwise is plainly in that position. It is also worth saying clearly, because a real chunk of this category does publish: Helium 10, Jungle Scout, Sellerboard, Scale Insights, Teikametrics, Perpetua, SellerApp, BidX, Particl and others all put numbers on a page. "Nobody in retail media publishes pricing" is a claim we have seen repeated and it is simply not true.

What matters for you is narrower than the philosophy. It is that you cannot model your own costs before you talk to someone, and therefore cannot build a shortlist on price. Every third-party figure you will find for Intentwise is either an estimate, a range lifted from a directory listing, or a number from a deal that closed under a different product line. We are not going to add another one to the pile.

What we can do is tell you what the quote is likely to contain, why it is bigger than the thing most reviews describe, and exactly what to ask so the number you get back is comparable to the numbers that are published.

You are being quoted for three products, not one

Almost every review of Intentwise you can find describes an Amazon advertising optimiser with a reporting layer bolted on. That is not what the company currently sells, and the gap is the single most useful thing on this page.

As its own site describes it today, Intentwise is a "Commerce Observability Platform" that "unifies fragmented marketplace data into one governed platform". It presents three layers:

• Intentwise Foundation — the data infrastructure: an AI Gateway with MCP, a data store, and pipelines.
• Intentwise Intelligence — the visibility layer, including Product 360 and Intentwise Explore for Amazon Marketing Cloud.
• Intentwise Optimize — the execution layer, covering Amazon DSP, Walmart, Criteo, Instacart, Target Roundel and TikTok advertising.

Three consequences follow, and each one changes how you should read a proposal.

First, a quote can legitimately arrive with three line items, and most buyers arrive having priced only the third. If the number surprises you, that is usually why.

Second, the thing being sold in Foundation is a data platform. Data platforms price on volume, connectors, retention and refresh frequency — none of which appear anywhere in a comparison against a bidding tool. Ask which of those meters exist and where the thresholds sit, because that is where a quote grows in year two without anyone renegotiating anything.

Third, and this is the fair-minded version of a point people usually make unkindly: the reviews predate the product. A repositioning around a governed data layer and an MCP gateway is recent. A review written about the older advertising tool is not dishonest and its author has done nothing wrong — it is simply describing a different piece of software from the one you would be buying. Date every review you read of any vendor in this category, including us, and discount anything written before the current product shipped.

Five different things this category charges for

Here is the analysis that actually makes a quote-only number usable, and we have not seen it written anywhere else. A quote is a number with no units. Before it means anything you have to know which of five bases it sits on — because the vendors who do publish are not all charging for the same thing at all. Every figure below was read from the vendor's own page on 20 August 2026.

• Per automated ASIN. Scale Insights runs a seven-rung ladder from $78/month billed monthly for 5 ASINs to $688/month for 100, with no ad-spend component on those plans.
• Per order volume. Sellerboard bands by orders processed — $19/month billed monthly for 3,000 orders up to $79/month for 50,000 — which is decoupled from advertising entirely.
• Per seat. Jungle Scout Catalyst charges $49/month billed monthly for Starter, and additional seats are also $49/month on that tab.
• Subscription plus a percentage of managed spend. Helium 10 lists Diamond at $279/month on annual billing, and its page states that Diamond customers incur a 2% management fee on PPC spend managed through Helium 10 Ads.
• A spend band with a percentage above a threshold. Teikametrics lists ARI Essentials at $149/month on the annual tab for accounts up to $10K of monthly spend, with higher tiers described as custom pricing plus 3% of ad spend over $10K. Perpetua publishes Essentials and Growth at $695/month with no currency label on the page, Growth adding an unquantified percentage above $10k of monthly spend. SellerApp's published agency arrangement is $300 plus 0.5% to 2.5% of Amazon ad spend.

Five bases, and a quote from a vendor who publishes none of them could be any of them. So the first question on the call is not "how much" — it is "what is that a percentage or a multiple of, and what makes it go up?" A $2,000 monthly number means one thing if it is fixed, another if it is 2% of a spend figure that doubles in Q4, and a third if it is metered on rows of data you will accumulate whether or not you look at them.

A decoder for the call: nine questions that turn a quote into a comparable number

Take these in order. They are written so that a vendor who is being straightforward can answer all nine in ten minutes, and so that the answers are directly comparable against the published rate cards above.

• What is the fee basis? Fixed, per seat, per marketplace, per retailer, metered on data volume, or a percentage.
• If a percentage — of what? Total account spend, or only spend inside campaigns the platform manages. The difference is frequently a factor of two.
• Is there a floor and a ceiling? Ask both. A floor makes a small account expensive; the absence of a ceiling makes a growing one expensive.
• Which line items make up the number? If the product has three layers, ask for three prices, then ask which you can drop.
• What is metered, and what happens at the threshold? Rows, connectors, retention, refresh, API calls, users.
• What is the term, and how does it renew? Month-to-month or an annual term that renews itself.
• How much notice to leave, and in what form? Written notice sixty days before an anniversary is common in this category.
• What is the uplift at renewal, and is it capped? Get a number, not a policy.
• What leaves with you? If they hold your warehouse, exit is a data question, not a billing one.

That last one deserves emphasis when the product is a data platform rather than a bidding tool. If your Amazon Marketing Cloud queries, your normalised retail-media history and your pipelines live inside a vendor's environment, switching cost is not the notice period — it is the rebuild. Ask, in writing, for the export format and whether historical data is included on termination.

Ask us the same nine. Dr. PPC's answers are $300 a month plus 3% of ad spend, charged on the spend we manage, capped at $2,500 a month, month-to-month with no renewal term, first 30 days free. We publish that because a reader who has to phone four vendors to build a shortlist usually gives up and buys from whoever answered first.

Run the comparison at your own spend

The calculator below carries the published rates from the vendors above at whatever monthly ad spend you set. The Intentwise row is deliberately blank, because guessing at it would be exactly the kind of confident, specific, wrong number this whole page is arguing against.

Used properly, the blank row is the useful one. Slide to your real spend, read off what the published options cost you in a year, and take that figure into the discovery call as the thing the quote has to beat or justify. If Intentwise comes back materially higher, that is not automatically wrong — it may be selling you a data layer that none of the other rows contain. But you will be able to say what the premium is buying, which is more than most buyers can.

Where this cuts against us: Dr. PPC is Amazon-only. If your problem is that retail media is scattered across Amazon, Walmart, Criteo, Instacart, Target Roundel and TikTok and nobody in your business can produce one governed view of it, a platform layer is the right shape of purchase and we are not that. Say so on the call rather than making four vendors bid for a job only one of them does.

Where we would push back on a like-for-like basis is narrower: observability is not operation. A governed data platform tells you, accurately and quickly, what happened. Somebody still has to act on it every week. Across 30 advertisers in July 2026 our own Amazon DSP book ran at 6.04x return on ad spend with a $5.49 cost per acquisition across 57,137 attributed purchases — and the thing that produced those numbers was not the dashboard, it was the weekly decisions made in front of it.

Read the contract, not the feature grid

When a vendor publishes no price, the terms of service become the only document you can read before a sales call — and they are usually more decision-relevant than the pricing page would have been.

The clearest published example in this category belongs to a competitor, not to Intentwise. Quartile's terms set an initial term of one year, automatically renewing for successive one-year periods, with either party required to give written notice of non-renewal at least sixty days before expiry; fees fall due in advance and are described as non-cancellable and non-refundable; there is a sixty-day evaluation window at the outset during which a client can terminate from inside their own account, and after that leaving early means paying an early termination amount.

That is a conventional enterprise contract and publishing it openly is to Quartile's credit. It is quoted here because the shape recurs across the category and because a one-year auto-renewing term with sixty days' notice leaves you roughly 305 days a year in which the decision to leave is actually available. Miss the window and you own another year of a product you have already decided against. Nobody writing feature comparisons mentions this.

So before the Intentwise call, or anyone's:

• Get the term length and renewal mechanism in writing, and diary the notice deadline the week you sign.
• Ask whether fees are payable in advance and whether any part is refundable.
• Ask for written notice of fee changes — from any vendor, including us.
• Ask what happens to your rate and your data on a change of control. This category has consolidated hard: Kenshoo became Skai, ChannelAdvisor became Rithum, Downstream was absorbed into Jungle Scout's Cobalt, and Perpetua has sat inside Omnicom via Flywheel since January 2024. Ownership changes are normal here and price-protection clauses are cheap to ask for before you sign and impossible after.

Who Intentwise suits, who we suit, and the Full Circle part

Intentwise suits an organisation with a data problem large enough to have a name. Several retailers, several markets, a team that already writes SQL against Amazon Marketing Cloud, and a genuine need for one governed store rather than eight exports. Its move toward an AI gateway and MCP access is aimed squarely at teams who want to query their own commerce data with their own tools, and that is a real and current strength.

Dr. PPC suits a different buyer entirely: an Amazon seller or brand who does not want another surface to look at. 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 the work is included rather than enabled. Orbit, our software suite, comes with it at no extra cost.

Here is the scale of work that fee is buying, measured across our own book rather than argued from one account. Over 47 managed brands and 3,086,624 search terms that took a click, 83% of those terms returned nothing, and 48.5% of all search spend — $4,962,963 of $10,243,379 — landed on them. No amount of observability closes that gap on its own; something has to act on it, repeatedly, at a cadence no human enjoys.

Two useful places to go from here, and only if the description matches you. If your comparison is really about Amazon DSP rather than sponsored ads — programmatic, audiences, incrementality testing — that is Dr. DSP, and it is a different product with a different conversation. If what you actually need is a published number to anchor a shortlist, our read of Teikametrics ARI pricing walks through the one competitor here that publishes both a tier and its percentage.

Dr. PPC, Dr. DSP and Orbit are products of Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands. On the transparency question specifically we are not uniformly ahead: we publish Dr. PPC's rate and we publish no price at all for Dr. DSP. That is worth saying on a page criticising the absence of published prices.