Smartly Pricing and Smartly.io Cost With Spend-Based Fees, Monthly Minimum and Renewal Terms

Smartly pricing is not published. Smartly sells through a discovery call, a demo and an Order Form, and its Terms of Use say fees and invoicing are whatever that Order Form specifies. Where the price is spend-based, the fee is calculated every calendar month on the advertising spend in your connected ad accounts, and unless the Order Form says otherwise you also pay a monthly minimum fee. The default contract runs 12 months and renews automatically unless you give written notice at least 90 days before it ends.

This is for a US performance marketing lead, brand team or agency owner who has Smartly on a shortlist, has an Order Form on the desk, or is coming up to a renewal and wants to know what the bill is actually built on. Everything below comes from Smartly's own Terms of Use (effective February 1, 2026), its about page, feature list and demo page, read on October 21, 2026. Where Smartly does not say something, this page says so instead of guessing.

Does Smartly publish its pricing?

No. There is no pricing page on smartly.io; the address returns a 404. Every call to action on the site is "Get a Demo", and the demo page describes the path: a 15 to 30 minute discovery call to confirm fit, then a personalized demo. The Terms of Use are the only public document about money, and section 5.1 opens with one line: "Fees and invoicing are specified in the Order Form."

That is normal for enterprise ad platforms. Celtra, Bannerflow and Storyteq do not publish rate cards either; we went through what their contracts say in Celtra pricing and what drives a Celtra quote and Bannerflow pricing and what a Bannerflow contract costs. What is unusual about Smartly is how much the public terms reveal about the shape of the bill, even without a number.

How the spend-based fee works

The terms describe the fee for subscriptions "with spend-based pricing" in three rules. Each one is a line you should find in your own Order Form.

A partial first or last month gets a prorated minimum based on the number of days. If Smartly cannot pull impressions or spend automatically for billing, the customer has to report them, so check which of your platforms it reads directly.

What counts as advertising spend in a Smartly contract?

This is the clause that surprises people. The terms define Advertising Spend as "all charges payable by Customer for all advertising conducted with respect to an Ad Account" on the ad platform, "regardless of whether Customer conducted advertising campaigns using the Service or not."

Read literally, once an ad account is connected, campaigns you run straight from Ads Manager in that account can count toward the fee too. That matters for teams that only want Smartly for one part of their media, say catalog ads, while running search or always-on campaigns by hand. Two ways to keep the base clean: agree in the Order Form exactly which accounts and campaigns are in scope, or keep the media Smartly does not touch in a separate ad account. Before your first invoice, check the spend figure Smartly bills against what the platforms report; a marketing dashboard that blends spend across every ad channel makes that a five minute check each month instead of a spreadsheet job.

How much does Smartly cost per month?

There is no official figure. Smartly has never published a rate card or confirmed a percentage. Several comparison pages written by competing ad tools quote a percentage of spend, a monthly floor and an annual contract value, but none of them cites a Smartly document, and they do not agree with each other. Capterra's US listing does not show a starting price. Treat any number you have not seen in your own Order Form as a guess, including the ones that look precise.

What you can say with certainty is how the cost is shaped. A spend-based fee plus a monthly minimum is built for advertisers spending serious money every month across several channels. The bigger and steadier your media budget, the more the percentage dominates the minimum; the smaller or more seasonal it is, the more often you pay the floor.

Invoicing, payment terms and late interest

Unless the Order Form says otherwise, Smartly invoices monthly in arrears and payment is due net 30 from the invoice date. Late payments accrue interest at 12 percent a year, or the maximum legal rate if that is lower, and the customer pays reasonable collection costs. If fees are not paid when due, Smartly can suspend access to the affected subscription with immediate effect.

Arrears billing is friendlier than a year paid upfront (Bannerflow's model), because you pay for a month after it happens. The flip side is that the bill is only known after the month closes, which makes budgeting the platform fee harder than budgeting a flat subscription.

Can Smartly raise prices during the contract?

Smartly may change pricing with at least 30 days written notice, unless your Order Form says otherwise. If you are on a fixed term, the change takes effect at the next renewal, not mid-term, and you can terminate the affected subscription to end on the date the new price starts by telling Smartly in writing before that date. In practice that means a price change announced shortly before your renewal gives you a clean exit, but only if someone is reading the notices.

How long is a Smartly contract, and how do you cancel?

Section 9.1 sets the defaults. You commit to a fixed initial term set in the Order Form; if the Order Form does not set one, the initial term is 12 months. After that the subscription renews automatically for successive terms of the same length, unless either side gives written notice at least 90 days before the end of the current term, naming the subscription to be terminated. Smartly can also end a subscription at the end of a term for convenience on 30 days notice.

The 90 day window is the number to put in a calendar the day you sign. On a 12 month term starting January 1, the notice deadline is early October. Miss it and you are committed for another full year. Either side can terminate immediately for a material breach left unfixed for 30 days, and in that case you can ask for a pro rata refund of prepaid fees for the unused period.

What you get for the fee

The fee buys a large platform. Smartly's feature list covers three suites. Creative: video and image templates, an AI Studio for image and video generation and enhancement, Dynamic Product Ads with templates for Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest, creative insights and predictive scoring. Media: automated ad creation and updates from a sheet or feed, Predictive Budget Allocation, Optimization Triggers and Dynamic Creative Optimization across Google channels. Intelligence: Brand Pulse for deduplicated reach and frequency measurement and a reporting dashboard. It also buys Connected TV across more than 200 streaming services and runs open web ads through the major DSPs.

The company was founded in 2013 by Kristo Ovaska and Tuomo Riekko in Finland, bought Viralspace.ai in 2021 and AdLib in 2022, and names Samsung, Spotify, Uber, Ralph Lauren, Tripadvisor and TUI as customers. That tells you who the pricing model is designed around: large advertisers who use the media and measurement suites every day.

Smartly pricing compared with tools that list their prices

Is Smartly worth it for a small team?

Usually not, and the reason is structural rather than about quality. A fee tied to media spend with a monthly minimum and a 12 month commitment pays off when the platform is launching and steering a lot of budget every day. A small brand or a two person agency that mainly needs static Meta and Google ads, launched by hand, would be paying a media platform's price for a production job.

For that job, a Smartly alternative built for static ads is a better fit. AdsCreator turns a product URL into headlines, primary text and on-brand images sized for Meta Feed, Stories and Reels, Google display and Performance Max, TikTok and LinkedIn, with variants to A/B test. Plans are listed on the pricing page, from $49 a month, and there is no fee on your ad spend. If you are weighing the whole category, the best creative management platforms roundup compares Smartly with Celtra, Bannerflow and Storyteq.

Questions to ask before you sign a Smartly Order Form

• Is the fee spend-based, flat or both, and what is the percentage at each spend band?
• What is the monthly minimum in dollars, and does it apply from month one?
• Which ad accounts are connected, and is any spend in them excluded from the fee base?
• Are several brands or regions on one subscription or several, and how does that change the tier?
• What is the initial term, and what is the exact date of the 90 day notice deadline?
• Is there a price lock for the first renewal term?
• Which features are in Early Access, and will they carry a fee later? The terms allow fees on free Early Access with 30 days notice.