What an ad audit costs in 2026 (manual vs tools vs us)
A working hourly cost of doing the same audit four different ways. Spoiler: the cheapest is not what most operators assume.
Every ad operator we've talked to either pays an agency, pays a tool, or does it themselves. Almost nobody has actually priced all three side by side. We did the math.
Path 1: Do it yourself manually
If you follow the 4-check workflow we wrote up in 'How to spot ad waste in 60 seconds', the first time takes about an hour. Subsequent weekly runs take 20-30 minutes. So you spend roughly 90 minutes per month. At $50/hour fully-loaded operator time that's $75/month in opportunity cost. At $150/hour for a senior in-house marketer, $225/month.
Path 2: Hire an agency to audit quarterly
Typical fixed-scope quarterly audit for a $5k/month ad spend account: $750-1,500 one-time. That's $250-500 per month amortized. Plus the agency only looks every 90 days — by the time they tell you to pause the leaky campaign, it has run leaky for 89 days.
Path 3: Subscribe to a tool
The market: Optmyzr starts at $208/month. Adalysis at $99 for one account. Madgicx at $44 (Meta only). Most are designed for agencies managing dozens of accounts; they're overkill for a single brand and the learning curve takes a week.
Path 4: FixAdSpend
Free tier with heuristic-only scan (no card). Starter $19/month with full Claude-powered agents on one ad account. Growth $49 for three accounts + custom branding. The breakeven vs. doing it yourself is roughly 25 minutes/month — most operators save that in week one.
What we're optimizing for
We built FixAdSpend for the 'I'd rather be doing literally anything else than re-running this audit' operator. If you genuinely enjoy the process, the manual path is the cheapest. If you don't, an extra $19/month for an automation that doesn't sleep is a fair trade.
Either way — you should know what you're paying for. That's the point of publishing this kind of breakdown rather than putting 'Talk to sales' on the pricing page.