Affordable AI video ads from $3,500 a month.
Twenty finished, platform-ready ads a month, first batch inside ten business days. Below is what the entry retainer covers, what it deliberately leaves out, and the accounts where cheap AI video ads are the wrong purchase.
What $3,500 a month actually buys
Twenty finished ads: written, generated, cut, captioned and delivered in four weekly batches your buyer can upload the same day. Not twenty renders of one script with different music behind it. Twenty ads means four to six genuinely different hooks, written against whatever is already converting in your account, each cut for the placements Meta and TikTok actually serve.
The entry tier assumes one brand, one product or product family, and one market in English. Those three assumptions are what hold the number down. Break any of them and the price moves, which is why they are stated here rather than discovered in the second invoice.
Two people work the account: a creative director who owns the hooks and a producer who owns the batch calendar. You get a shared channel with both, read-only access to your ad account is requested so the scripts can learn from results, and the first batch lands within ten business days of the brief.
What you are buying is throughput at a quality that survives a paid feed. It is not the cheapest video on the market. It is the lowest price at which the output is still worth putting spend behind.
What you get at this price
- 20 finished ads a month, delivered in four weekly batches on a fixed day
- Four to six distinct hooks, written against the winners already in your account
- AI-generated presenters licensed for commercial advertising use
- 9:16 and 1:1 cuts with burned-in captions and platform-safe text placement
- Two rounds of revisions per batch, inside the agreed scope
- Every ad tagged by hook, format and offer so results feed the next batch
- Source projects and the hook library, owned by you outright
- A one-page monthly read of what performed and what we are changing
The tagging matters more than it sounds. An untagged batch of twenty ads produces a spreadsheet nobody reads; a tagged batch tells you that the problem-first hooks beat the price-first ones by a factor of two, and that is the input to next month.
Helio Home ran this shape for twelve months: six creatives a month became sixty, lead time went from six weeks to five days, and blended ROAS moved from 1.9x to 3.1x on their own account data. They buy a higher tier; the pipeline is the same.
What you do not get at this price
Every agency page lists inclusions. The exclusions are the part that decides whether this is the right purchase, so they are here in the same size type.
- No 24/7 or same-day turnaround. Batches are weekly. An urgent ad is a favour, not a term.
- No bespoke model training on your brand, your founder or a named presenter. That is a separate project from $12,000.
- No unlimited revisions. Two rounds per batch, and a rewritten brief mid-batch is a new batch.
- No media buying. We do not run your ads, hold your budget, or take a percentage of spend.
- No account manager and no weekly status call. A shared channel and a monthly read.
- No localisation. Other languages are quoted separately, around $4,000 per market per month at Helio Home volumes.
- No live action. No real actors, no studio, no product in a real hand.
- No brand strategy, positioning or landing page work.
The media buying exclusion is deliberate. Agencies paid a percentage of spend have a structural reason to want your budget to rise. We are paid a flat fee for a fixed number of ads, so the only way we look good is if the ads work at your current budget.
The live action exclusion is the one that sends people elsewhere most often, and it should. If the ad only works when someone genuinely uses the product on camera, book a creator and pay the $400.
What the alternatives cost
Ranges are the market rates we quote against in 2026. The influencer figure is what Helio Home was paying before they moved.
The cost per finished ad, honestly
The entry tier is the most expensive per ad we sell, and that is not a trick. Hook research, presenter setup, format templates and the monthly read are fixed costs. At twenty ads they are spread across twenty; at a hundred they are spread across a hundred, so the per-ad number falls while the work per ad does not.
If cost per ad is the number you are optimising, the entry tier is the wrong tier and you should buy volume. If cash flow is the number you are optimising, $3,500 is where to start, and moving up later costs nothing but a conversation.
How we keep it this price
One pipeline, not a bespoke process per client. Hooks are written against your account, but the scripting frames, presenter library, caption styles and export presets are ours and already exist. You are paying for the work that is specific to you, not for a workflow being invented again.
Batch generation. Model runs are queued and rendered together overnight rather than one at a time on demand. That is a genuine cost difference, and it is the reason the delivery cadence is weekly rather than instant.
No casting, no location, no travel, no reshoots. The single largest line in a traditional ad budget is people in a room on a day, and that line is gone.
Two people, no account layer. A creative director and a producer. No account manager, no weekly status call, no deck. The monthly read is one page because one page is what gets read.
Fixed volume, capped revisions. Twenty ads and two rounds means we can price the month before it starts, in both directions. Open-ended revision cycles are what turn a cheap retainer into an expensive one halfway through.
When you should spend more than this
Six accounts where we would tell you to spend the money somewhere else. This is the part we would want to read if we were buying.
Creative is not your constraint
If the offer, the landing page or the margin is what is broken, twenty more ads move a bad funnel faster. Fix the funnel, then buy volume.
Your spend is under about $3,000 a month
You cannot read twenty creatives on a hundred conversions. Buy six carefully made ads, or spend the $3,500 on the landing page instead.
The claim needs a real person
Supplements, finance, medical, anything where a testimonial is a regulated claim. A generated presenter cannot testify, and no price makes that legal.
The product has to be handled
Texture, fit, food, assembly. Generated footage of a real product being used in a real hand is still the weakest thing AI video does. Shoot it.
You need broadcast or CTV quality
A 30-second spot with a director, a colourist and a sound mix costs what it costs. Paid social ads and brand films are different products.
The brand is a founder
If people follow a face, the face has to be real and has to be theirs. We can script and cut for them; we should not replace them.
Why creative volume is the thing you are buying
Paid social does not reward the best ad, it rewards the account that finds winners fastest and replaces them before they fatigue. If roughly one ad in ten becomes something you can scale, six creatives a month produces a winner in some months and nothing in others. Twenty produces two, reliably enough to plan around.
That is the whole case for cheap AI video ads, and it is about supply rather than craft. A studio ad may well beat any single ad in the batch. It arrives six weeks later, once, and when it fatigues there is nothing behind it.
The first month, week by week
Brief
Ninety minutes: offer, audience, objections, the ads already working.
Hooks and scripts
Concepts written against your winners, one approval round, then production.
First batch
Generated, cut, captioned, tagged. Ten ads delivered ready to upload.
Cadence
Weekly batches, with last week's results feeding next week's scripts.
What we need from you to hold the price
- Brand assets, product shots and the claims you can actually support
- Read-only access to the ad account, so hooks are written against real results
- One decision-maker who can approve a batch
- Approvals inside 48 hours, or the weekly cadence slips
- A landing page that already converts the traffic you send it
The 48-hour approval line is the one that breaks most often, and it is the honest reason some cheap retainers feel slow. Twenty ads a month is a production line, and a production line stops when a batch sits in someone’s inbox for a fortnight.
If approvals cannot move that fast, say so at the brief. We will restructure into fortnightly drops of ten, which costs the same and fails less.
Ad work we have shipped
Questions about cheap AI video ads
Per finished ad, yes, by a wide margin. Booked directly, influencer UGC runs $400 to $900 a video before usage rights, which is what Helio Home was paying before they moved. The same money buys twenty ads here instead of four to eight. What it does not buy is a real person making a real claim.
Doing it yourself with a generation tool, at $49 to $500 a month. That is genuinely cheapest if someone on your team will write hooks, prompt, cut, caption and upload every week. The subscription is the small cost; the eight to twelve hours a week is the large one. Our entry tier exists for teams where nobody has those hours.
At the $3,500 entry retainer, $175 per finished ad. At sixty a month it falls to about $133, and past a hundred to about $120. The per-ad number drops because hook research, presenter setup and format templates are fixed costs spread wider, not because the ads get thinner.
Only if your media spend is large enough to read twenty creatives. Below roughly $3,000 a month in spend you will not get enough conversions per ad to tell a winner from noise, and you should buy six good ads rather than twenty. Above that, creative volume is usually the cheapest lever available.
Yes. A one-off first batch of twelve AI UGC ads is $1,800, and it is the sensible way to find out whether this works for your account before committing to a month. Roughly half the accounts that buy a batch move onto the retainer; the rest learn something cheaply either way.
No more than any other ad, provided the claims are ones you can support. The rejections we see come from claim language and landing page mismatches, not from generated footage. Where a platform requires a synthetic media label we apply it, and build the ad so it does not eat the hook.
No. Generation costs sit inside the retainer at the entry tier, which is one of the reasons the monthly volume is fixed at twenty. If you want a specific premium model for a specific campaign we will price it separately and show you the difference before you agree to it.
You do, outright: the finished ads, the source projects and the hook library. There is no licence that lapses when the retainer stops, and nothing stops working if you leave. Helio Home owns 340 ads produced this way.
In month one that is normal, and the batch still tells you which hooks died fastest. If nothing has moved by the end of month two we say so and look at the offer and the landing page instead, because at that point the creative is not what is broken.
Concepts within three business days of the brief, first delivered batch within ten. After that it is weekly, on a fixed day, so the buyer can plan the testing calendar around it.
Want to see the first batch before committing?
Send the product and the ads already running. We will come back with three hook directions and a straight answer on whether the entry retainer is the right size for your spend.