How Much Does Paid Social Cost in 2026? A Real Pricing Breakdown

The Two Numbers People Confuse

Every "how much does paid social cost" question is really two separate questions: how much goes to the platform (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn) as ad spend, and how much goes to whoever is running it as a fee.

The platform doesn't care who's spending — a well-run £3,000/month Meta budget and a poorly-run £30,000/month budget can both underperform for the same structural reasons. The fee is what you're paying for the difference between those two outcomes.

Typical Ad Spend Ranges

For a brand testing paid social seriously for the first time, a workable starting range is £2,000–£5,000/month in ad spend — enough to exit the platform's learning phase within a reasonable window without over-committing before you have signal on what converts.

Beyond that first stage, spend tends to scale with proven ROAS rather than a fixed monthly number: brands increase budget when a campaign is clearing its target cost-per-acquisition, and pull back when it isn't. This is why "what should I spend" rarely has a single right answer — it depends on what your numbers can already prove.

How Agency Fees Are Usually Structured

Three models dominate the market: a flat monthly retainer, a percentage of ad spend (commonly 10–20%), or a hybrid of a smaller retainer plus a performance component.

Flat retainers are the most predictable and the easiest to budget against — you know the number regardless of how spend moves. Percentage-of-spend models scale with your budget, which sounds aligned but can quietly reward an agency for spending more rather than spending better. Hybrid models try to split the difference.

Convertec runs a tiered flat-fee model (from £2,500/month) specifically to avoid the incentive problem with percentage-of-spend — see the [Pricing page](/pricing) for the three tiers and what's included in each.

What Actually Moves the Number

Four things change what you should expect to pay, more than anything else:

Number of platforms. Running Meta alone is a different scope than running Meta, TikTok, and Google in parallel — each platform has its own creative requirements, reporting, and optimisation cadence.

Creative production volume. Performance creative gets stale fast. A brand that needs 6+ new concepts a month is buying a materially different service than one running a handful of evergreen ads.

Reporting and strategy depth. Self-serve dashboards versus a named strategist reviewing performance weekly and adjusting the plan is a real cost difference, not just a nice-to-have.

Account complexity. A single product, single market brand costs less to run well than a multi-market, multi-SKU catalogue with different messaging per segment.

The Honest Answer

If you're asking this question before a first call, the realistic range for a brand doing this properly — real ad spend plus a fee that isn't structured to work against you — starts around £4,500–£7,500/month all-in for a single-platform, single-market setup, and scales up from there with platforms, creative volume, and complexity.

Anyone who gives you a firm number without asking what you're actually trying to achieve is guessing. The free 60-minute discovery session exists specifically to answer this properly for your situation rather than with a generic range.