You've asked four agencies the same question and gotten four different numbers.
One quoted $500. Another quoted $3,000. A freelancer quoted $150. None of them explained why. You're not confused because Facebook ads are expensive. You're confused because nobody's told you what you're actually paying for.
Here's the real breakdown. No sales pitch.
Ad spend and management fee are two different bills.
Ad spend is what you pay Meta for impressions and clicks. Management fee is what you pay a person or agency to build and run the campaign. When an agency says "$500 a month," they usually mean the fee. Your ad spend sits on top of that. Mixing the two up is why every quote you've gotten sounds like a different price for the same service.
See a real quote broken into both numbers →
What you should actually expect to pay, by business size:
- Small local business: $300–1,000/month ad spend, $150–500/month fee
- Growing ecommerce or lead-gen business: $1,000–5,000/month ad spend, $500–1,500/month fee
- Scaling brand: $5,000+/month ad spend, flat fee or percentage of spend
The single mistake that inflates cost more than anything else: boosting a post.
A boosted post has no retargeting, no lookalike audience, no funnel. Every dollar buys one cold, one-time shot at a stranger who's never heard of you. That's the real reason people say "Facebook ads don't work." They never ran ads. They ran a boost and called it a campaign.
"But every agency quotes something different for my industry."
That part's actually true. Here's why. Cost per lead depends on your industry more than your platform. A real estate seller lead usually runs $6–15. We got one client down to $6.80 with a structured, retargeted campaign, not a boost. A SaaS demo signup runs $30–80. A law firm inquiry runs $50–200+. Anyone who quotes you one flat number without asking your industry first is guessing, not calculating.
What actually controls your cost, no matter your budget:
Targeting precision, creative quality, and whether you're retargeting warm traffic instead of only buying cold clicks. Fix those three and your cost per result drops, without spending a dollar more.
One thing worth knowing before Q4:
CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) climb every November and December as every retailer bids for the same eyeballs. If you're planning to test Facebook ads this year, testing now costs less than testing in six weeks.
Real numbers from a real account, not a stock case study:
One of our current clients has spent PKR 51,454.54 total and generated 630 messaging conversations: PKR 81.67 per conversation. That's what a properly structured campaign costs to run, not a guess.
Tell us your industry and target city. Get a real number, not a range →