Acorn Cost: No Rate Card, but a Knowable Structure

What we could verify today, and what nobody in this set publishes

We checked the vendors' own sites rather than a roundup. Neither shows a number.

Acorn-i — the London Amazon and ecommerce specialist majority-owned by The Brandtech Group since June 2022, whose site mentions neither that nor the Jellyfish Commerce combination announced in November 2023 — lists services, technology and case studies, and routes every path to a contact form. Acorn at New Engen, the creator marketing suite formerly called Acorn Influence, does the same. Neither is hiding anything unusual: scopes in managed commerce media vary so widely by catalogue size, marketplace count and creative load that a public rate card would be rewritten the first time anyone saw a real plan. We do not publish a rate for reMKTR either, and it would be dishonest to treat their silence as a red flag while excusing our own.

Worth clearing up before you budget: the Acorns investing app, which dominates this search term, is an unrelated company. And Amazon DSP below means the demand-side platform for programmatic display and video, not Delivery Service Partner, the courier franchise, which has an entirely different cost base.

What you can establish before any call is the anatomy of the bill. That part is stable even when the rates are not.

The four lines inside a managed Amazon media invoice

Almost every quote in this category is some combination of the same four things. Get each one named separately and most of the ambiguity disappears.

• Working media. The money that actually buys impressions. This is the only line that can produce a sale.
• Technology or platform fee. A licence, a percentage, or a per-seat charge for the software the campaigns run through.
• Service fee. The people. Usually a monthly retainer, a percentage of media, or both, and this is the line where quotes diverge most.
• Production and data. Creative builds, resizes and versioning; audience or measurement data where it is charged separately.

Then ask the question that changes the arithmetic more than any rate: is the budget I state inclusive or exclusive of your fees? If a contract says forty thousand a month and the fees sit inside it, your working media is not forty thousand, and every efficiency number calculated against the headline figure is flattered. Ask for one illustrative month written out in full — budget, fees, media — before you compare two proposals side by side.

Two floors that no negotiation removes

Whichever partner you pick, two costs sit underneath the quote.

The first is Amazon's own. Amazon states that its managed-service option for Amazon DSP typically requires a minimum investment of USD 50,000, and that self-service customers keep full control of their campaigns. That figure is Amazon's, published on advertising.amazon.com, and it is why the third route exists: an agency with its own seat can run display for brands whose budget sits below the level Amazon will take directly.

The second floor is the operator. Someone has to build audiences, rotate creative before it fatigues, read the placement report and switch things off. Buy software and you are hiring that person yourself, on salary. Buy a service and they are inside the fee. Neither is free, and a comparison that counts a licence against an agency percentage without counting the salary is not comparing like with like.

Both floors are the reason the cheapest-looking quote often is not. The number to compare is total cost of the outcome, not the fee on the front page.

The one published yardstick nearby, and how to use it

Almost nobody in commerce media publishes list prices. Skai does, which is genuinely to their credit and makes them useful as a reference point even if you never buy them. Their pricing page lists Standard at $114k per year for advertisers spending up to $4M annually, with three higher annual bands above it, billed annually. Check their page before you rely on it — vendors revise these.

Here is the arithmetic that makes a published licence useful to someone weighing a percentage-based service. A fixed annual fee and a percentage of media cross over at one specific spend: divide the fee by the rate. A fixed $114,000 a year is the same money as a 12% service fee on roughly $950,000 of annual media. Below that spend the percentage is cheaper; above it, the licence is — before you add the salaried operator to the licence side.

Run that crossover with your own numbers before any call. It tells you which model you should be shopping for, which is a better use of an hour than asking five vendors for a discount.

Currency, VAT and the cross-border quote

This one is specific to Acorn-i and it gets missed. The business is London-based inside a global group, so a US brand may receive a quote denominated in pounds, or be invoiced by a different group entity than the team it met.

Three questions save an unpleasant surprise at renewal. Which legal entity issues the invoice, and in which currency? If the fee is a percentage of media and the media is bought in dollars, what exchange rate is applied and when is it struck? And how is VAT or sales tax treated on the service fee for your jurisdiction — a rate that looks competitive can move once tax and a few points of currency drift land on it.

None of this is unique to them. Any cross-border agency relationship carries it, ours included where it applies. It simply belongs in the comparison, because a fee quoted in a currency you do not earn in is a variable cost dressed as a fixed one.

The cost that decides more than the fee does

Everything above is about the fee. The larger cost sits inside the media, and it moves by nearly a factor of three depending on what you ask the money to do.

From a second pull off our own Amazon DSP API — 27 advertiser seats across the 31 days from 15 July to 14 August 2026, a different window and a different advertiser set from the July figures below, which is why we keep the two apart rather than blending them — prospecting cost 2.7 times more per customer than retargeting: $12.13 against $4.47. Retargeting line items returned 7.27x and prospecting 3.28x on roughly equal spend, $315,666 against $306,785. And prospecting produced a 46.6% new-to-brand rate against 29.2%.

Read as a return comparison, prospecting is plainly the loser — which is exactly why a plan judged on one blended ROAS target tends to drift toward retargeting over time, whoever is running it. Read as an acquisition cost, it is a $12 new customer. Which reading is right depends on your repeat purchase rate, which is why consumable and subscription categories can carry a prospecting budget that hard-goods categories cannot. So put this to any partner quoting you, ourselves included: what prospecting-to-retargeting split are you proposing, what does each side cost per new customer, and which of those two numbers is my fee calculated against? A plan weighted to retargeting will report beautifully, and some of what it reports you already had.

The undisclosed point, and how we are priced

Fixed fees get all the scrutiny on a call and the variable rate is where the money actually is. At $40,000 a month of media, a single undisclosed percentage point is $4,800 a year — and points, unlike retainers, scale with your success. Two points is a hire.

reMKTR charges a percentage of media spend. That is a normal way to buy media, plenty of good firms do it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or attack the model. What we will do is state the rate in writing before you sign and say what it covers. We are part of Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with $500M+ in managed spend across 100+ brands, and we run 109 live Amazon DSP advertiser seats.

What the fee buys is buying and proof. Across 30 advertisers in July 2026 our DSP book returned 6.04x on ad spend at a $5.49 cost per acquisition across 57,137 attributed purchases, with 20.1% of those purchases coming from shoppers new to the brand. Last-click attribution cannot prove incrementality and never could; holdouts and matched controls can, and we reconcile in Amazon Marketing Cloud so DSP and sponsored ads stop double-counting each other.

If your spend is below the level where a managed service makes sense, Dr. DSP is the same capability sold as a product with the first 30 days free, which is usually the cheaper route at small display budgets. And if the money is leaking out of sponsored ads rather than display, Dr. PPC publishes its price — $300/month plus 3% of ad spend, capped, month to month — so you can run the crossover arithmetic above against a real number.