Quartile pricing: the terms of service are the only document that prices it

The pricing page does not exist, and that is a choice rather than an oversight

Ask for a Quartile pricing page and you land back on the home page. We checked again on 21 August 2026. The site is well built and says a great deal about capability and nothing at all about cost. The button is Request Demo, everywhere.

That is a defensible position and it is worth saying so before the rest of this page presses on it. Quartile sells a tiered service across many retail media channels, and any single published figure would be wrong for most of the people reading it. Several of its closest competitors take the same view — Pacvue's pricing path returns a 404, Intentwise's does too — so this is a category norm rather than one company's evasion, and it should be stated neutrally rather than as an accusation.

What it costs you is comparability. A marketing director cannot put a defensible number in a budget line without booking a call and disclosing their ad spend, which is a real cost in time and in negotiating position. So the useful thing this page can do is tell you what shapes the quote before you take that call. Unusually for a vendor that publishes nothing, Quartile has written a good deal of it down — just not where anybody looks.

What the terms say sets the fee, and the distinction almost everyone gets wrong

The terms of service are the only pricing text Quartile publishes, and they are more informative than the marketing pages. They define standard pricing tiers keyed to a client's level of usage, and they name what that takes into account: your aggregate monthly advertising spend in the channels Quartile manages, the number of advertising platforms it manages on your behalf, and the level of service agreed between you. The actual figures, the document says, are the ones set out in your order form. No amount and no rate appears anywhere in it.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to translate into something it does not say. A fee keyed to your spend level is not the same thing as a percentage of your spend. A tier is a step: you sit in a band, and the fee for that band is the fee whether you spend at the bottom of it or the top. A percentage is a rate that moves with every dollar. The two behave very differently at the edges — a tier can make a small budget increase expensive if it pushes you up a step, and a large one cheap if it does not. A good deal of third-party writing has quietly filled that gap with a percentage range. Nothing Quartile publishes supports it, we are not going to repeat it, and you should not accept it from anyone who cannot point at the sentence it came from.

The input people underestimate is the second one. Channel count is named as a pricing factor in its own right, and a brand selling on Amazon US, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK and Walmart is four connections rather than one. Add Google and Meta and the shape of the bill changes again. Before the call, write down every account, marketplace and platform you would want managed in the next twelve months — including the ones you are only considering — and ask for the quote against that whole list rather than today's footprint. Ask specifically what happens to the tier when you add one mid-term, while you are still the party being sold to.

The rest of that contract is the most decision-relevant document Quartile publishes

Every ranking article about Quartile pricing discusses features. Not one of them cites the terms, and the terms are where the money actually sits. Four clauses, quoted from the document rather than characterised:

• The initial term is one year from the effective date.
• It automatically renews on each anniversary for successive one-year periods.
• Either party may decline to renew by giving written notice at least sixty days before the current term expires.
• Unless the order form says otherwise, fees are due in advance of services rendered, and are non-cancellable and non-refundable, with no refunds due on termination.

None of that is unusual for enterprise software and none of it is a scandal. It is, however, the difference between a decision you can reverse in a quarter and one you are living with for two years if you miss a date. The sixty-day window is the clause to diarise the moment you sign, because a notice period you forget is an automatic renewal you did not choose. Fees payable in advance and non-refundable is the clause that decides how much of a bad first quarter you eat.

Turn all of that on us as well, because it is only a useful question if it is asked of everyone. Dr. PPC runs month to month with the first 30 days free, so the equivalent clauses are short — but ask us the same things, in writing, and hold any vendor who will not answer to the same standard. Term, renewal, notice, refundability and what data leaves with you are where the real risk lives in this category, and almost nobody writes about it.

Which spend the tier is measured against — the question that changed our own contracts

The terms say the tier is keyed to your aggregate monthly advertising spend in the channels Quartile manages. That sentence contains three separate things to settle: which channels count, what counts as spend, and what happens to the measurement in a peak month.

We learned to take this seriously from the other side of the table. A client once challenged being charged a percentage of gross Amazon revenue rather than net, and they were right — we amended our contracts to a net basis. That is one personal-care brand and one conversation, not a policy anybody handed us. Gross revenue includes money that never reaches the seller: refunds, returns, and in some structures promotional funding. A percentage taken on gross charges a brand for its own returns. It is a small clause with a large compounding effect on a scaling account, and it is a fair question to put to any vendor, us included.

The Quartile version of that question is the same shape and applies to a tier rather than a rate. Ask what is included in aggregate monthly spend, whether it is measured gross or net of anything, whether it is a trailing average or a single month, and — the one people forget — what happens in November. If a peak month lifts you a tier, ask whether you come back down in January and how quickly. A pricing input measured on your worst month for comparability is a materially different contract from one measured on your average.

The review record is big enough to be real, and still prices nothing

Quartile is one of the few vendors in this category with a public record large enough to carry weight, so we opened all three platforms on 21 August 2026 rather than quoting an aggregate, and printed each count next to its score.

• Trustpilot — TrustScore 4.8 across 559 reviews.
• G2 — 4.6 across 215 reviews.
• Capterra — 4.5 across 94 reviews.

Note what happens at that volume: the three platforms land within about three tenths of a point of each other. That convergence is itself the useful signal, and it is the opposite of what we find on smaller vendors, where a dozen reviews on one site and nine on another routinely disagree by more than a full point. When a record is thin, the average describes who happened to write. When it runs to hundreds across independent platforms, it starts describing the company. On this measure Quartile is well ahead of us — we run no public review programme at all.

What it still cannot tell you is what you will pay, or whether the reporting will answer the question you actually have. That second one is worth planning for with any multi-channel vendor. Across our own accounts, blended ACOS is the metric most likely to end a relationship, because it can look excellent for a year while non-branded growth stops entirely: a healthy branded harvest subsidises the average and the account coasts on demand it did not create. Then the question arrives — what are you doing for my non-branded growth — and there is no answer anywhere in the reporting. Ask, before you sign, whether the platform will separate budgets and efficiency targets by strategy lane, and whether it will report category impression share rather than only ACOS. On a cross-channel programme the blending problem is worse, not better.

Where Quartile is genuinely the right answer

If your media really is spread across Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Criteo's retailer network, Google, Meta and Microsoft, and you want one system optimising across all of it with a strategist attached, Quartile is built for exactly that and the credible alternatives are few. Its own site describes coverage across Amazon Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP, Walmart, Instacart and Criteo — which brings retailers such as Target and Best Buy — alongside Google, Meta and Microsoft, with more than 5,300 customers across 32 countries and over $2B in annual retail ad spend running on the platform. That is scale we do not have on those channels and we are not going to pretend the breadth is decoration.

It also suits brands that want software and people from one supplier rather than hiring an agency separately from a platform. That bundling is a legitimate reason to accept a quoted price, because you are buying an arrangement rather than a SKU, and a rate card genuinely cannot describe it.

It suits you worse if Amazon is most of your revenue, if you need a defensible budget number before a procurement conversation, or if you cannot get the tier mechanics stated plainly enough to model a second year.

What a published price looks like, and where else to go

Dr. PPC is $300/month plus 3% of ad spend, capped, month to month, with the first 30 days free. Base and variable, both on the page, with no threshold at which the number becomes a conversation and no channel count to negotiate.

Underneath it: the system reads the entire ad account, writes a strategy for each product against that brand's real unit economics, then proposes every change with the evidence behind it, a plan for measuring it and a trigger for rolling it back. You set the autonomy level, from every change waiting on a click through to fully autonomous inside guardrails you agreed. Inventory risk, pricing, launches and creative always come to a person. Orbit — advertising and sales analytics, search terms, campaign and ASIN profitability, keyword and traffic tracking, inventory, finance and the BSR, buy box, price and fee trackers — is included at no additional cost, so if you are comparing software against software, Orbit is the honest like-for-like and Dr. PPC is the managed tier above it.

We charge a percentage of ad spend and we think it is a reasonable way to price work that scales with an account. The only thing we would argue for is that you should be able to read the whole formula before you talk to anyone — ours or anybody's.

Three redirects, each for a different constraint. If the part of Quartile you are really pricing is its Amazon DSP capability, compare that against Dr. DSP, or against reMKTR if you would rather buy it as a service on our seats. If margin is leaking through fees, storage and stockouts rather than media, no retail media platform on this page touches it and Dr. Stock does. And if what you actually need is a team owning listings, catalogue and supply alongside advertising, that is Full Circle — the full-service Amazon management company all of these products came out of, with $500M+ in managed revenue across 100+ brands. We quote rather than publish for that engagement, which puts us in the same position as Quartile and worth saying out loud on a page about published prices.