AdButler alternatives: when the add-ons outgrow the plan

What AdButler sells and how it charges

AdButler is a hosted ad server for publishers and ad networks. Its pricing page is complete enough to calculate a real bill from, which makes it one of the few ad servers you can compare against a build without a sales call.

The four plans: Essentials "Starts at $179/month for 1M ad requests" with 10 advertisers, 1 user and 10 zones; Standard "Starts at $682/month for 10M ad requests" with 50 advertisers, 5 users and 100 zones; Advanced "Starts at $2988/month for 50M ad requests" with 100 advertisers, 5 users and 1,000 zones; Enterprise is "Contact Us" with unlimited advertisers, users and zones.^[1]

Ad formats are not the same on every plan. Essentials lists ad serving for "Display, mobile, and in-app"; video appears from Standard upwards, where the row reads "Display, mobile, video, and in-app".^[1]

The add-ons are where a bill grows. API Access is $550 a month and is "Available for: Essentials, Standard" — its panel says AdButler provides it "free of charge for advanced and enterprise plans". Log Level Data is priced by volume, not by plan: "$1100/month + $0.015 CPM" below a billion impressions and "$1100/month + $0.01 CPM" at a billion or more. Basic Targeting is "$275 /month +$0.005 CPM" on all four plans, with Complete Targeting at $1,100 a month plus the same CPM. Programmatic Advertising is "$110 /month + $0.001/thousand bids" on Essentials and Standard, usage-only above them. Enhanced Ads is "$110 /month +$0.01 CPM" on Essentials and Standard and included on Advanced and Enterprise. The Self-Serve Marketplace is "$2200 +3.5% of Generated Revenue", and White Label Domains "From $59 /month".^[1]

Two add-on cards and their own detail panels disagree, so read the panel before you budget. The Integration card says "From $500 /month" while its panel lists only "DocuSign for Contract Management $550/month" and "Lingo24 Integration $1100/month"; the Digital OOH card says "From $250 /month +$25 Additional Zone" while its panel lists "10 Zones $275/month + $0.005/CPM" and "50 Zones $825".^[1]

The pricing page says nothing about contract term, set-up fees or a free trial.^[1] That silence is worth noticing next to Revive's hosted edition, which publishes the headings "No long-term commitment" and "No setup fees".^[6]

A worked example, as arithmetic on the published list prices rather than a figure AdButler states: a network on Standard serving its 10 million ad requests, all filled, with API access, log-level data and basic targeting, pays $682 for the plan, $550 for the API, $1,100 plus $150 of CPM for log-level data at the below-a-billion rate of $0.015, and $275 plus $50 of CPM for targeting — $2,807 a month, about four times the plan price.^[1] The monthly parts do not shrink when traffic dips; the per-thousand parts grow when it rises.

AdButler vs the alternatives vs an own ad server

Stay on AdButler if…

1. 1.Your traffic fits a plan and you need few add-ons. A flat $179 to $2,988 a month^[1] is far less than the cost of a team that could run an ad server for you.
2. 2.You sell direct campaigns to a known set of advertisers. If 10, 50 or 100 advertisers per plan^[1] is enough for your sales team, the cap never binds.
3. 3.You need several formats from one hosted system. Display, mobile, video and in-app from one account on Standard and above^[1] would each be a separate piece of work on your own servers.

Consider leaving AdButler if…

1. 1.Symptom: the add-on lines are larger than the plan line. API access, log-level data and targeting together cost more than the Standard plan itself in the example above.^[1] At that point you are paying for access to your own data and your own automation.
2. 2.Symptom: the advertiser cap decides how many clients you can sign. Plans stop at 10, 50 and 100 advertisers below Enterprise,^[1] and Epom's comparison page makes the same point: "Capped at 10, 50 or 100 by tier".^[2] Growth then means a plan priced on request.
3. 3.Symptom: your ad product is decided inside your own app or catalogue. Retail media and sponsored listings are chosen server-side from your own product and user data. When every ad request is billed^[1] and decisioning needs your data at request time, an API-first ad server or your own decisioning service fits the shape better.

What to settle before leaving AdButler

A migration path in four steps

1. 1.Export while the API is on. Reports, logs, advertisers, campaigns, creatives and zone definitions, before the add-on that gives you access is cancelled.^[1]
2. 2.Rebuild on the new side. Recreate campaigns and zones, connect demand, and test targeting rules against the same sample of requests.
3. 3.Serve in parallel. Move a share of zones and reconcile impressions, clicks and revenue daily until the two systems agree within a tolerance you set in advance.
4. 4.Cut over by zone, then cancel. Move the rest in stages, switch domains, cancel add-ons, and keep the exports for as long as your contracts require.

What drives the cost of building your own

These are the cost drivers, not a price.

• Decisioning and pacing. Choosing the ad for each request, capping frequency and spreading delivery across a campaign's flight.
• Formats. Display, native, video and audio each have their own markup and tracking.
• Creative delivery. A content delivery network for images and video, and a review step for what advertisers upload.
• Reporting pipeline. Impression and click events counted once, stored as long as you decide and reconciled with demand partners; see event integrity in ad measurement.
• Programmatic demand. Header bidding or an OpenRTB connection when direct sales do not fill the inventory; the build-or-rent decision is in build, license or rent.
• Self-serve. Sign-up, payments, creative approval and balances, if advertisers buy without a sales team.
• Traffic quality. Filtering invalid traffic before it reaches an invoice.
• Operations. An ad server that stops serving stops revenue, so it needs on-call cover.
• What you do not have to build. Revive Adserver's source is available under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later,^[7] so part of this list can start from an existing codebase rather than a blank page.

Disclosure: this page is published by amBrain. From amBrain's AdTech services: "DSP development, real-time bidding platforms, and ad exchange engineering." The last row of the comparison table is the kind of work amBrain does. Every vendor fact on this page links to its source, and one source, Epom's comparison page, is a competitor of AdButler's and is labelled as such. AdButler, Kevel, Revive Adserver, Broadstreet and Epom are trademarks of their owners and are used only to identify the products discussed.