Smartly pricing: Is it worth it in 2026?

Smartly’s pricing page is gone. Open smartly.io/pricing and you get a 404 pointing you to the homepage, the blog, and customer success stories. The only way to learn what Smartly costs is to contact sales.

So here is what you’ll actually find out on that call, based on what customers report, and what the alternative looks like in plain numbers.

How Smartly pricing works

Smartly’s pricing model is a percentage of total media spend for any connected ad account. Not the campaigns running through the platform. Every account you connect. Customer reviews on Capterra describe it that way, and G2’s plan cards list both Smartly plans as “% Fee of Media Spend” with a get-in-touch quote.

What people report paying: some customers report contracts around $100,000. Others report $300,000. G2 reviewers say the fee was difficult to justify at lower spend levels and describe minimums rising over time. One long-time customer on Reddit put it more directly: they started charging “a percentage of total ad spend on the account, not just the campaigns running through their platform.” Another summed up the market’s read in three words: an arm and a leg.

What you’re paying for

Smartly is not alone here. Enterprise suites like Smartly, Mediaocean, Sprinklr, and Skai sell one cross-channel bundle: social, Google, CTV, DSPs, no published modular pricing. More channels, more you pay. If you only run paid social, you are negotiating against a platform priced and packaged for everything else.

The math to do before the call

Take one ad account spending $2,000,000 a month. An enterprise suite charging 3% of connected spend bills $60,000 a month on that account. Now look at how much of that spend actually runs through the creative platform: often $300,000, sometimes less. The other $1,700,000 is campaigns the tool never touched, and you paid 3% on it anyway.

Hunch bills on the $300,000. Same account, same campaigns, a fraction of the fee. So the question before any pricing call is simple: is it worth paying 3% of your total connected spend for campaigns that use a fraction of it?

How Hunch pricing works

Plans start from $2,500/month. Hunch charges only for the campaigns that run through Hunch, inside the ad accounts you connect. The rest of the account’s spend is not part of the fee. No per-account limits, no channel bundle, and the starting price is right here on the page instead of behind a call.

Is Smartly worth it in 2026?

If your media plan spans Google, CTV, and DSPs, yes, that is what the suite is built for. If your growth lives on Meta, TikTok, and Snap, you’d be paying a suite price for a single-channel job, and funding a Google product with your Meta budget.

Enterprise catalog advertisers run that math and pick the platform priced for the work. Academy Sports + Outdoors runs its catalog creative on Hunch: 2.3x incremental ROAS, verified by a Meta Conversion Lift Study, outperforming competitor creatives by 102%. The Gym Group went from 15 ads a month to 150+ at 25% lower CPA.

Full breakdown: Hunch vs Smartly. Coming soon on our side: AI-native reporting and Hunch Agentic, native AI workstreams for paid social. See what our CEO just introduced.

Comparison based on publicly available information and customer reports as of September 2026. The opinions and claims expressed here are based on Hunch’s understanding of the platforms and may not reflect the views of Smartly.io. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.