How much do creative agencies charge? Every US route, priced off the vendor's own page

01What does ad creative cost in the US, by route?

Four families of route, and the monthly prices span three orders of magnitude. A software seat starts at $14. A video-editing subscription starts at $495. A design subscription runs $699 to $4,995. Superside's floor is $15,000 a month on an annual term. Every figure below came off the vendor's own page on September 3, 2026.

The monthly figure hides the thing that decides your budget: what each route makes you supply. Vidpros and VidChops edit footage you already own. A software seat makes material and leaves every hour of briefing, selection and QA with you. A UGC marketplace pays a creator to film once, then prices the usage window separately. The sister journal walks these routes on craft rather than money, in creative subscription, freelancer, or studio.

Two of those routes are not really priced at all. JoinBrands prints a floor of $25 or more for a UGC video, then adds a platform fee of 8% to 15% by plan. Insense prints $500 a month, a 10% marketplace fee, and creator pay from $100 a video: three numbers that become a price only once a campaign exists. The usage window is a fourth, and it has its own arithmetic in what UGC usage rights cost.

02The top of the market stopped printing prices

Superside's pricing page prints one number and a fee. Subscriptions "start at a $15,000 monthly minimum on an annual term", the Dedicated plan is "starting at $30,000 a month", and the subscription "includes a monthly budget and a $1,000 software fee". What the page does not print is a turnaround time, a revision policy, or a cancellation term.

Design Pickle prints no dollar figure at all. Flat rate, not hourly, no retainers, and the plan gets sized to what you need on a call. It does print terms, and good ones: most requests come back within one to two business days, revisions are included with no per-change fee, and you can cancel before your next renewal date. I pulled a June 2025 archive copy of the same page to see whether the silence was recent. It was not.

A price you have to book a call to hear is a price that depends on how the call goes.

The rule I price against

That absence costs a buyer two things. The first is a week: book the call, sit through discovery, receive a number with your own answers already priced into it. The second is comparison. You cannot set a quote you had to earn beside a quote anyone can read. For a small buy that skips procurement entirely, how to buy ad creative without an RFP is the short version.

03What does one finished asset cost on each route?

Where the vendor prints a count, division works, and the answer runs from about $30 to $375 for one thing you could put in an ad account. Trend.io does the division itself: $91.67 a video at Starter, $69.14 at Scale. Icon prints $1,000 for six human UGC ads. Brighter Click prints $4,500 for twelve. The sister journal priced these routes on September 1, 2026, in AI ads, UGC creators, or an agency.

Four of those eight bars are my arithmetic, not a vendor claim. Collabstr's $154 comes from more than 21,000 collaborations in its own 2026 report, which makes it a marketplace's book on its own supply rather than a survey of the US market. The ManyPixels figure assumes 21 business days and a queue that keeps up.

Our own plans sit inside that band rather than under it, but you will not find a figure on our page any more. The number reaches you in the reply, in your own currency, and it arrives with your first finished ad rather than before it: one printed dollar figure cannot be honest to a buyer in Ohio and a buyer in Warsaw at the same time, and every page above prints one anyway. Divide whatever you are quoted by the asset count in your mix and you have the same unit as every row here, which is the only comparison that travels. The line items a monthly agreement should name are in what a creative retainer includes.

04Where a $14 seat beats a studio on price

Pencil's Core plan is $14 a month for 50 generations. HeyGen Creator is $29. AdCreative.ai Starter and Creatify Starter are both $39. A buyer who will write their own briefs, run the tool and throw away their own bad takes can put ads into an account for a tenth of what any studio here charges. That is a real alternative and I will not talk around it. Those prices buy generations. The direction and selection hours stay with you, and they are the expensive part.

The same logic runs the other way against edit-only subscriptions. VidChops Weekly is $495 a month for up to 16 short-form videos, roughly $31 each, and on headline dollars an edit-only subscription beats anyone who shoots and builds the thing from scratch. It also assumes you already own a camera, a shoot and a library to cut from. The comparison is fair only if you do.

05Should you hire someone in-house instead?

At some volume, yes. One in-house film and video editor runs about $9,100 a month once you take the BLS median of $75,420 for May 2025, gross it up by the private-industry benefits share in the Employer Costs release, and add an Adobe seat at $99.99 and a Frame.io seat at $25. That buys one person, no producer, no stills. The full arithmetic, and the honest case for hiring anyway, is the fully loaded cost of an in-house creative hire.

06What the industry publishes instead of a rate

I went looking for the industry number and there is not one. The ANA's Trends in Agency Compensation, 18th edition, has a real stated sample, 101 client-side marketers fielded in the second quarter of 2022, and it measures how agencies get paid rather than what a reel costs.

The $342,000 figure that circulates for a thirty-second commercial has no publisher I could find, and cost per finished ad says why. The denominator that would decide your budget, the share that survives selection, is published by nobody: ours runs at 43%.

Every price on this page cost me a fetch and a date stamp. The two vendors at the top of this category will give you neither, and they are betting you will not notice that a number set on a call is a number set on you.