You ask for three quotes to run your Facebook ads. The first one says €400 a month. The second says €2,500. The third gives no price at all and asks for 20% of your ad budget. None of the three describes the same thing, and you have no obvious way to compare them.
That is the real problem with this market: there is no reference price because there is no standard service. Under the same label, "campaign management", one provider sells two hours of settings tweaks a month, while another sells ad creatives, a full funnel and lead follow-up all the way to the phone call.
Here is how to read those quotes, what each billing model really encourages, and when each option starts to pay off. The figures below come from the French market, where Solvya operates, and are quoted in euros.
First, two bills, not one
This is the most expensive confusion, and it explains half of the disappointments.
When you advertise on Meta, you pay for two separate things. On one side, the ad budget, paid directly to Meta, which buys the display of your ads. On the other, the management fee, paid to the person or company that designs, launches and runs the campaigns.
A provider who quotes "€1,500 a month, all included" without giving the split leaves you in the dark on the most important point: how much money actually reaches your audience. If €1,000 goes to fees, €500 is left for delivery, barely enough to rise above the noise in a decent catchment area.
Always ask for the breakdown. And be wary of setups where the ad budget flows through the provider: you lose visibility on the real spend, and you lose your account history if the relationship ends.
To size the delivery budget itself, separately from the fees, start from your target cost per lead and the number of leads you need, not from what is left once the fees are paid.
The four billing models, and what each one encourages
A pricing model is never neutral. It decides what your provider has an interest in doing whenever a trade-off comes up.
The monthly retainer. A fixed amount, a defined scope. It is the most readable model and the most common one for small and mid-sized businesses. Its weakness: nothing mechanically pushes the provider to do more once the retainer is paid, only the fear of losing you. Its strength: your costs are predictable and your interests are not bent out of shape.
A percentage of ad spend. Usually between 10 and 20% of spend, sometimes lower on very large accounts. This model makes sense when budgets are large, because the workload really does grow with the number of campaigns. But it creates a direct conflict of interest: your provider earns more when you spend more, not when you earn more. On a local business budget, a few hundred or a few thousand euros a month, it also produces tiny fees that cannot fund any serious work.
A setup fee, then a subscription. An upfront amount that covers the initial work, which is real and concentrated: ad account, conversion tracking, form, first creatives, landing page. Then a lower monthly amount for ongoing management. It is the most honest model about what actually happens, because the first month easily represents three times the work of the fifth.
Pay for performance. Per lead, per appointment, sometimes a percentage of revenue. Appealing on paper, since you only pay for what comes in. Two serious caveats. First, this model mechanically pushes volume over qualification: the provider gets paid when a form is filled in, not when the project is serious. Second, it is almost impossible to settle fairly without shared tracking, because a lead who never answers the phone is still a billed lead.
Price ranges on the French market
These ranges are positioning benchmarks for France, not an official price list. The market is fragmented and nobody publishes reliable statistics.
A junior freelancer usually sits at the low end of the market, a few hundred euros a month. At that price, you are buying campaign settings, rarely ad creative, never strategy. That works if you already have your visuals, your offer and your funnel, and the only thing missing is someone to press the right buttons.
An experienced freelancer or a small specialist shop usually charges between €1,000 and €2,500 a month, often with a setup fee the first time. This is the range where the service starts to include creatives, the form, follow-up and real campaign management.
A structured agency rarely starts below €2,000 to €3,000 a month, and its entry tiers target five-figure ad budgets. Below that, your account becomes the smallest one in the portfolio, which is rarely a good place to be.
An automated platform or self-serve tool costs a few dozen euros a month. It handles the launch, not the decisions. Nobody looks at your leads, nobody rewrites the ad that is not working, nobody tells you to stop.
In-house, the math is rarely carried through to the end. Someone able to run campaigns seriously costs a salary, plus ramp-up time, plus the fact that they will only ever see one account, yours. This option becomes a good one when advertising is a permanent, central channel, not when it is just starting.
What really drives the price
It is not the number of hours, it is the scope. Run every quote through this list and you will immediately see where the gap comes from.
Ad creatives. Who produces the visuals and the copy, how often, and how many variations per month? It is the heaviest line item and the one that matters most for results. A provider who recycles the three photos from your website for six months is not managing anything.
The form and how it qualifies. A poorly configured form produces volume you cannot use. Filtering questions are worth more than targeting.
The landing page, when the campaign uses one, along with its conversion tracking.
Lead routing. Does the lead reach you by text and email in real time, or does it sit in a Meta interface nobody opens? That detail decides how many of your calls get answered.
Follow-up after the form. Automated reminders, a sequence for people who do not pick up, reactivation of long-term projects. Nurturing is often missing from quotes, even though it changes the return of the whole channel.
Reporting. A readable dashboard showing cost per lead and how it evolves, or a screenshot of Meta Ads Manager sent on the 30th of the month.
Two quotes showing €900 and €1,800 almost always cover different scopes. The cheaper one becomes the more expensive one as soon as you have to buy elsewhere what it does not include.
The threshold below which nothing holds
There is a minimum ratio between what you pay for management and what you spend on delivery. Below it, the equation breaks on its own.
If your fees exceed your ad budget, you are mostly paying for working time on a data volume too small to decide anything. Meta needs a certain number of conversions to exit the learning phase and stop groping around. On a tiny budget, the algorithm never learns, and the best specialist in the world is making decisions blind.
In practice, for a local business selling services worth several thousand euros, a delivery budget under €600 or €700 a month makes the exercise fragile. Not impossible, fragile: week-to-week swings become unreadable and the temptation to shut everything down after ten days becomes huge.
The right response is not to find a cheaper provider. It is to wait until you have the delivery budget you need, or to start with a channel that needs less volume, which is often the real question behind choosing between Meta Ads and Google Ads.
The calculation that settles it
The price of a service is not judged in euros. It is judged in the number of clients you need to sign to cover it.
Take the average value of a job or a service, then your real margin on it. Next, add up the fees and the ad budget over three months, because one month proves nothing. Divide. You get the number of sales needed to break even.
A contractor who signs €15,000 jobs at a 30% margin clears €4,500 per sale. A quarter at €2,000 a month all in, fees plus delivery, comes to €6,000. So two sales in three months are needed to break even, and anything beyond that is profit.
The same calculation for a €400 service with a €100 margin requires sixty sales over the same period. It is not the provider who is too expensive, it is the channel that does not match the average order value.
Run this calculation before comparing quotes. It will tell you whether the question is "which one should I pick" or "should I go ahead now at all". Cost-per-lead benchmarks for your industry help refine the estimate.
The clauses that cost more than the price
Three points get negotiated before signing, never after.
Asset ownership. The ad account, the page, the pixel, the audiences and the data history must be in your name, with the provider working on them through granted access. The opposite is common and it locks you in: leaving means starting from scratch, with an algorithm that no longer knows anyone.
Commitment and notice period. A twelve-month commitment on a channel that is judged over three is a bad sign. A one-month notice period is normal, a long commitment is not.
Written scope. Number of creatives per month, meeting frequency, response time, who writes the copy. What is not written down will not get done, and the complaint will surface in month three, when the relationship is already strained.
Five questions to ask before signing
Ask them word for word. The answers are more revealing than any brochure.
How much goes to delivery and how much to fees, exactly? How many new ad creatives per month, and who produces them? Whose name is the ad account in? How do leads reach my phone? And what happens if, after three months, the cost per lead is still too high?
That last question is the most revealing one. Someone who promises you a specific number before looking at your offer, your area and your average order value is selling a promise, not work. Someone who explains what they would look at, in what order, and at what point they would advise you to stop, is telling you the truth about their job.
What I recommend
For a local business that sells services worth several thousand euros and is starting out on Meta, the model that holds up is this one: a setup fee covering the initial work, then a fixed monthly subscription with no long commitment, with the ad budget paid by you directly to Meta, on your own account.
This setup has three virtues. You see exactly where every euro goes. Your provider has no interest in inflating your spend. And you can walk away, which remains the best quality guarantee there is.
This is the model Solvya uses, and the reason the ad budget never appears on the invoice. If you want to know what it would look like for your area and your average order value, the quickest way is a thirty-minute conversation: book a slot.