Scale Insights pricing: the per-ASIN ladder, the band edges, and the 1% plan

The seven rungs, read off their own page

Every figure here came from Scale Insights' own pricing page on 20 August 2026. The structure is unusually clean for this category: one axis, seven rungs, and no percentage attached to the ladder at all.

• Scale 5 — $78/month billed monthly, or $748 for the year. 5 automated ASINs.
• Scale 10 — $98/month billed monthly, or $940 for the year. 10 automated ASINs.
• Scale 20 — $178/month billed monthly, or $1,708 for the year. 20 automated ASINs.
• Scale 35 — $288/month billed monthly, or $2,764 for the year. 35 automated ASINs.
• Scale 50 — $388/month billed monthly, or $3,724 for the year. 50 automated ASINs.
• Scale 75 — $548/month billed monthly, or $5,260 for the year. 75 automated ASINs.
• Scale 100 — $688/month billed monthly, or $6,604 for the year. 100 automated ASINs.

The annual discount is real and it is consistent: $748 against twelve months of $78 is a 20.1% reduction, and $6,604 against twelve months of $688 is 20.0%. We checked every rung rather than one, because a discount that holds on the cheap tier and evaporates on the expensive one is a thing that happens. It does not happen here.

Above the ladder sits The 1% Plan — 1% of ad spend, unlimited automated ASINs, arranged by contacting them. And the trial is genuinely 30 days with no card required, with automation limited to one product in one country while you evaluate.

The real unit is cost per automated ASIN, and it moves by a factor of two

Nobody buys a rung. They buy the ASINs on it. So the number that decides whether this is expensive is the fee divided by the ASINs you actually automate — and that number is not remotely stable.

At full utilisation the ladder rewards scale in a straight, sensible line. Scale 5 works out at $15.60 per automated ASIN per month. Scale 10 is $9.80. Scale 20 is $8.90, Scale 35 is $8.23, Scale 50 is $7.76, Scale 75 is $7.31, and Scale 100 lands at $6.88. That is a clean volume curve and it is the version of the story their pricing page tells.

Now put yourself one ASIN into a band instead of at the top of it. Six automated ASINs means paying for Scale 10, which is $16.33 per ASIN — worse than the entry rung. Eleven ASINs means Scale 20, at $16.18 each. Twenty-one means Scale 35, at $13.71 each.

So the effective rate for the identical service ranges from $6.88 to $16.33 per automated ASIN depending on nothing but where your catalogue happens to fall relative to a band edge. That is a 2.4x spread, and it is invisible on the pricing page because the pricing page shows the rungs, not the gaps between them.

None of this is a trick. Banded pricing does this by construction, and Scale Insights publishes the bands plainly, which most of the category does not. It just means the honest question is not "which plan" but "how far past an edge am I about to step".

The eleventh ASIN costs more than the first ten

Follow the band edges one at a time and one of them is dramatically steeper than the rest.

• Going from 5 to 6 automated ASINs moves you from $78 to $98 — a 25.6% increase in your bill for one product.
• Going from 10 to 11 moves you from $98 to $178 — a 81.6% increase for one product.
• Going from 20 to 21 moves you from $178 to $288 — 61.8%.
• 35 to 36 is 34.7%. 50 to 51 is 41.2%. 75 to 76 is 25.5%.

The eleventh ASIN you switch on raises your annual cost by $960 all by itself. The ten before it, collectively, cost $1,176 a year. One product roughly doubles the bill, and it does so at the exact catalogue size where a growing private-label seller tends to sit.

What to do with that is not "avoid Scale Insights". It is: decide which ASINs deserve automation before you pick a rung, not after. On most accounts a minority of the catalogue carries almost all the ad spend, and automating the long tail buys you very little. If ten automated ASINs cover 90% of your spend, the eleventh is an $80-a-month decision about a product that might be spending forty.

We would apply exactly the same scepticism to our own pricing, and readers should. The difference in structure is that a percentage of ad spend has no band edges in it — it moves by one dollar when your spend moves by thirty-three. Neither shape is virtuous. They just fail differently, and it is worth knowing which failure you are buying.

Where the 1% Plan overtakes the ladder

The 1% Plan is the interesting one, and the crossover arithmetic is simple enough to do in your head: 1% of spend equals a fixed rung at exactly one hundred times that rung's monthly fee.

• The 1% Plan costs more than Scale 5 above $7,800 of monthly ad spend.
• More than Scale 20 above $17,800.
• More than Scale 50 above $38,800.
• More than Scale 100 above $68,800.

Read from the other direction, that makes the 1% Plan a genuinely good deal for a specific reader: a large catalogue with modest spend. If you are running $12,000 a month across 200 SKUs, the ladder cannot serve you at all without a custom arrangement, and 1% is $120 — less than Scale 20. If you are running $70,000 a month across eight products, the ladder at $98 is a rounding error and the 1% Plan would cost you $8,400 a year for the same automation.

The pricing page states the rate but not the surrounding commercial terms, so the questions to take to that sales conversation are: is the 1% charged on total account spend or only on spend inside campaigns the tool manages, is there a floor, is there a ceiling, and does the rate step down at higher volumes. Those four answers change the number more than the headline does.

Ask us the same four, incidentally. Dr. PPC charges 3% of ad spend on top of $300 a month and the total is capped at $2,500 a month, which is our answer to the ceiling question — but you should still make us say it rather than assume it.

Run it at your own numbers

Here is the comparison live. Move the slider to your real monthly Amazon ad spend and watch which lines move and which do not.

What it shows first is structural. Nearly every Scale Insights line is flat, because their ladder is not priced on advertising spend at all. Ours climbs, because ours is. At $25,000 of monthly spend the gap is roughly $870 a month in their favour; at $75,000 it is larger.

So here is the concession, stated plainly rather than buried in a FAQ, and stated precisely because a concession that is loosely worded is worse than none: on fee arithmetic alone the ladder rungs are flat, so Scale 20 at $178/month billed monthly is a smaller invoice than ours at every spend level this slider reaches — Dr. PPC starts at $300 before a dollar of percentage. The 1% Plan is also cheaper than us all the way to $250,000 of monthly spend, which is where our $2,500 cap finally overtakes it. Two honest edges run the other way and we will name them too: at low spend the Scale 100 rung at $688/month is the larger invoice, and above $250,000 the 1% Plan is. If the question you are answering is "what is the smallest invoice that gets me automated bidding", the answer on this page is not us, and no amount of arguing about caps changes that.

The reason we still think the comparison is worth having is that the two things are not the same purchase. Scale Insights sells you an engine — their own site describes 11 algorithms and more than 200 parameters for building rules, engineered by five FBA sellers with $200M+ of their own revenue behind it. That is a real credential and it is also a description of a tool that expects an operator. Somebody has to decide what those 200 parameters should say, watch what the rules do, and change them when the account changes. Dr. PPC is the fee with that work already inside it.

Price both honestly and the comparison is $178 a month plus your operator's hours against a single line item. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on what an hour of your team's attention is worth, which is a number only you have.

Read the contract, not the feature grid

The pricing page is the least decision-relevant document most of these vendors publish. The terms of service are the most, and almost nobody reads them before signing — including the people writing comparison articles.

Here is what that looks like in practice, using the clearest published example in the category. Quartile's terms of service set an initial term of one year from the effective date, 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 are due in advance of services rendered and are described as non-cancellable and non-refundable. There is a sixty-day evaluation window at the start during which you can terminate from inside your own account, and after that termination means paying an early termination amount.

None of that is unusual or improper — it is a normal enterprise software contract, and Quartile deserves credit for publishing it where anyone can read it, which is more than most of its peers do. The point is that those clauses decide more about your risk than any feature list, and no ranking review of any of these tools quotes them.

So take this checklist to every vendor on your shortlist, ours included:

• Term and renewal. Month-to-month, or an annual term that renews itself? If it renews, how many days' notice, and in what form?
• The real decision window. A one-year auto-renewing term with sixty days' notice gives you about 305 days of the year in which you can act. Diary the date the week you sign.
• Fee changes. Get written notice of any change in fees, from any vendor including us.
• What the percentage is charged on. Total account spend or managed spend only.
• Data portability. On exit, what leaves with you — the rule sets, the historical performance data, the negative keyword lists you built?
• Change of control. This category has been consolidating for four years. Ask what happens to your rate if the company is acquired.

Scale Insights sells month-to-month on the ladder and publishes the rungs, which puts it near the transparent end of this market. Get the answers to the last three in writing anyway.

What a per-ASIN fee does not price: the search terms underneath

Per-ASIN pricing has one genuinely attractive property that is worth naming, because it cuts in Scale Insights' favour. A fee attached to products is indifferent to how many search terms those products attract — and that count is much larger than most sellers imagine.

Put a number on it. Across the 47 brands we manage, Amazon delivered clicks on 3,086,624 distinct search terms from 1 May 2026 onward — tens of thousands per brand, none of them chosen by anybody. On a per-ASIN plan every one of those costs exactly the same as none of them. That is a real advantage of the model and we will not pretend otherwise.

The catch is on the other side of the same fact. 83% of those terms produced no sale, and 48.5% of all search spend — $4,962,963 of $10,243,379 — went to them, while 0.9% of 891,585 terms drove 80% of all sales. A rules engine handles the shape of that beautifully once you have told it what to look for. What it cannot do is notice a pattern you have not yet written a rule about, which is the failure mode every rules engine shares and the reason the parameter count is a workload rather than a feature.

That is the actual dividing line between the two purchases on this page. It is not price and it is not capability. It is whether the hours to run the engine exist inside your business.

Two places to go next, and only go if the description fits. If you are weighing the per-ASIN ladder against a fee that scales with spend instead, our breakdown of Teikametrics ARI pricing covers the other common shape — a flat tier under a spend threshold with a percentage above it. And if the reason your catalogue is expensive to automate is that half of it should not be advertised at all, that is an inventory and margin question before it is a bidding one, which is what Dr. Stock exists for.

Dr. PPC, Dr. Stock and Orbit are all products of Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands. Orbit is included with Dr. PPC at no extra charge.