The Trade Desk vs StackAdapt: fees, terms and a third option

What each vendor publishes

The Trade Desk publishes no price list on its site.^[3] Its annual report sets out the model: "We generate revenue by charging our clients a platform fee generally based on a percentage of our clients' total platform spend and from providing value-added services and data to support their advertising campaigns." The percentage is not disclosed anywhere in the filing. On contracts: "Generally, these MSAs have one-year terms that renew automatically for additional one-year periods, unless earlier terminated, and are terminable at any time upon 60 days' notice by either party", and they "do not contain any material commitments on behalf of clients to use our platform to purchase ad inventory, value-added services or data".^[1]

For scale, the filing reports 2025 revenue of $2,896,284 thousand on gross spend of $13,394,683 thousand, and defines gross spend as "the amount of a client's spend on our platform for advertising inventory, value-added services and data; plus the platform fee, which is generally based on a percentage of a client's total spend on our platform".^[1] Because the fee is inside the gross-spend figure, dividing one by the other does not give any client's rate.

StackAdapt publishes plans, not prices. Its tiers run from Basic, paid by credit card, through Grow, Scale and Accelerate with net terms available, to Enterprise on custom terms. Its FAQ says: "Most DSPs charge a percentage of media spend as a platform fee. At StackAdapt, there are no hidden tech fees, and clients can choose self-serve, managed, or hybrid support models depending on their needs."^[2] Its terms add three things worth pricing in: "THERE MAY BE A REQUIRED MINIMUM CAMPAIGN VALUE IN CONNECTION WITH SUCH INITIAL CAMPAIGN"; invoices "may be inclusive of usage-based charges, third-party pass-through costs and StackAdapt fees"; and "StackAdapt's analytics system shall be the sole basis of measurement for the purpose of determining the amounts due".^[4]

On breadth, StackAdapt's home page offers campaigns "across connected TV, video, display, native, audio, digital out-of-home, email, and direct mail from one platform".^[5]

The Trade Desk vs StackAdapt vs an own DSP

Stay on The Trade Desk or StackAdapt if…

1. 1.You run campaigns for many advertisers across channels, with your own traders. That is The Trade Desk's design: a self-service platform whose clients control purchasing decisions, with APIs to build their own tools on top.^[1] Rebuilding that breadth of supply for one agency is not a sensible project.
2. 2.You are a mid-market marketer who wants help running campaigns. StackAdapt offers "self-serve, managed, or hybrid support models" and a card-paid entry tier,^[2] with CTV, video, display, native, audio, DOOH, email and direct mail from one platform.^[5]
3. 3.Your spend does not pay for a bidder team, and your data does not need to be in the bid. Neither vendor requires a long spend commitment: The Trade Desk's MSAs carry no material commitments,^[1] and StackAdapt's possible minimum is scoped to the initial campaign.^[4] Renting is the cheaper stage.

Consider leaving both if…

1. 1.Symptom: the platform fee is your margin. If you resell media, run a trading desk or operate a vertical ad network, a fee "generally based on a percentage of our clients' total platform spend"^[1] is charged on the same money your business earns from.
2. 2.Symptom: your model or your first-party data should decide the bid, not just pick the audience. Rented platforms decide what runs inside their bidder. Bidder-as-a-service is the middle step — AdExchanger reported that on Beeswax "users can install their own algorithms"^[8] — and an own bidder is the full step. See running a model inside the bid request.
3. 3.Symptom: you need your own counting. At StackAdapt, its analytics system is "the sole basis of measurement for the purpose of determining the amounts due".^[4] If your clients pay you on your numbers, you need logs you own to reconcile against.

When an own DSP does not fit: agencies buying many channels for many clients, advertisers whose spend is below what a bidder team costs, and teams without on-call engineers or their own SSP relationships. For them the third option is the wrong one, and a portable-data policy on a rented DSP is enough.

A migration path in four steps

1. 1.Measure the fee you actually pay. The Trade Desk's percentage is in your contract, not in its filings;^[1] StackAdapt's charges arrive on invoices that "may be inclusive of usage-based charges, third-party pass-through costs and StackAdapt fees".^[4] Build the business case on those numbers, not on public ones.
2. 2.Pilot one workload. Move one channel on one exchange, such as display retargeting, to your own bidder or to a bidder-as-a-service, and keep the rented seat for CTV and everything else.
3. 3.Build your own measurement first. Log every bid and impression in your own storage and reconcile daily against the vendor's reporting; without it you cannot compare the two.
4. 4.Expand as the unit economics prove out. Keep the notice windows in view: generally 60 days at The Trade Desk and 90 at StackAdapt.^[1][4] The build decision itself is covered in build, license or rent a DSP.

What drives the cost of building your own

These are the cost drivers, not a price.

• Bid traffic. The Trade Desk's own platform operations expense covers hosting for "internet traffic" associated with "the viewing of available impressions or queries per second".^[1] Every request you receive costs money whether you bid or not.
• Timeouts. OpenRTB 2.6 defines tmax as the "Maximum time in milliseconds the exchange allows for bids to be received including Internet latency to avoid timeout", and the specification's video example sets it to 120.^[7] Pauses in the bid path become lost auctions; we compared Rust and Go for RTB bidders.
• Supply. Each SSP is a contract and an integration with its own testing.
• Identity. The Trade Desk describes Unified ID 2.0 as "an open-source identity framework";^[1] an own DSP can adopt an open framework without renting a platform, but that inference is ours, and the integration work is still yours.
• Measurement and logs. Storage and queries for every bid and impression.
• Channels. Each channel you add, such as CTV or audio, brings its own formats and supply.
• Consent. In the EU, TCF vendors "Retrieve and/or receive users' choices in real-time" and respect them.^[6]
• Operations. A bidder earns only while it answers, so it needs on-call cover.

Disclosure: this page is published by amBrain. From amBrain's AdTech services: "DSP development, real-time bidding platforms, and ad exchange engineering." The third column of the comparison table is the kind of work amBrain does. Every vendor fact on this page links to its source. The Trade Desk, StackAdapt, Beeswax and Unified ID 2.0 are trademarks of their owners and are used only to identify the products discussed.