Acorn cost — no published price, and the arithmetic to take to the call

First, which Acorn, and which DSP

Two disambiguations before any numbers, because both of them send people to the wrong page.

Acorn is a four-way name collision. The company relevant to Amazon advertising is Acorn-i, at acorn-i.com. It is not Acorn by New Engen, not Acorns the investing app, and not Acorn TV. Search results for the bare word belong overwhelmingly to the non-marketing ones, which is why cost pages about this company are so hard to find.

Amazon DSP is the Demand-Side Platform — the programmatic system for buying display, video and audio inventory on and off Amazon. It is not Amazon's Delivery Service Partner programme, which is the parcel-delivery franchise. If you arrived here budgeting for delivery vans, that is a different search entirely.

Now, what Acorn-i actually is. Reading their own site on 20 August 2026, they describe themselves as "A Technology Led Ecommerce Agency" and "Experts in Amazon and ecommerce", offering ecommerce strategy, curated content creation, Amazon Ads and retail media management, and consumer shopping insights. They run their own analytics application called Ignite, which they describe as combining marketplaces, Amazon, DTC websites and advertising channels in a single view. They are London-based. They publish a client retention claim of 94% beyond twelve months. They name client work across beauty, FMCG, home and garden, and health and wellness.

They publish no price, and their site does not mention Amazon DSP by name. Neither of those is a criticism — a full-service agency quoting on scope is entirely normal, and plenty of agencies buy Amazon DSP without saying so on the homepage. It just means that if DSP is specifically what you are buying, you should ask whether it is in scope before you ask what it costs.

The four fee architectures, and why the shape matters more than the number

Every quote you will receive in this category is one of four shapes, or a blend of two of them. Knowing which one you are being handed is worth more than knowing the figure attached to it, because the shapes fail in completely different places.

• A fixed licence. A flat annual or monthly fee, sometimes banded by how much media you run. Predictable. Punishing if your spend is at the bottom of a band and cheap if it is at the top.
• A percentage of working media. The fee moves with the budget. Simple to compare across vendors, and the one where a single undisclosed point does the most damage at scale.
• A banded tier keyed to several variables at once. Quartile's published terms are the clearest example in the category: their "Standard Pricing Tiers" account for "Client's aggregate monthly advertising spend", "the number of advertising platforms that Quartile manages", and/or "the level of Service agreed upon". That is three axes, and moving on any one of them can move your tier.
• Insertion-order based, priced per impression or per click. Criteo's only published pricing sentence is that "Our solution pricing is IO based, supporting both CPC or CPM pricing" — the fee is inside the media rate rather than beside it.

The question that separates these in practice is not "what percentage". It is "is my media budget inclusive or exclusive of your fee?" If a partner spends your $100,000 and takes their fee out of it, you bought less media than you thought. If they invoice the fee separately, your $100,000 all went to the auction. Two quotes with identical headline percentages can differ by the whole fee depending on which answer applies, and it is a one-sentence question.

One competitor publishes a full rate card, and it is the best yardstick available

Because Acorn-i publishes nothing, the useful move is to find a comparable vendor that publishes everything and use it to calibrate. Skai does. Read on skai.io on 20 August 2026, their tiers are annual, in US dollars, and banded by annual media spend:

• Standard — $114,000 per year, up to $4M of annual media spend.
• Advanced — $276,000 per year, up to $10M.
• Enterprise — $504,000 per year, up to $20M.
• Enterprise Premier — $756,000 per year, up to $35M.
• Enterprise Premier + — custom, above $35M.

Skai deserves genuine credit for this. Publishing four exact annual figures against four exact spend bands is rarer in retail media than it should be, and it lets a buyer do arithmetic that nobody else in this category permits.

Here is the arithmetic. Divide each tier by the top of its band and you get the implied fee as a percentage of media at the best possible position within it: 2.85% at $4M, 2.76% at $10M, 2.52% at $20M, and 2.16% at $35M. That is a clean, sensible volume curve, and it tells you what a software licence for this job costs when expressed the way agencies quote — as a percentage.

One important caution before anyone uses that as a benchmark against an agency quote. Skai is software you operate; Acorn-i is a team who operate it for you. Comparing the two percentages directly is comparing a licence to a licence-plus-labour, and the honest version of the comparison adds a realistic cost for the people who will run the platform. That number is yours, not ours.

The band edge nobody multiplies out

The percentages above are the best case in each band. Now walk one dollar past an edge.

At $4,000,000 of annual media spend, Skai Standard costs 2.85% of it. At $4,010,000 — a quarter of one per cent more media — the buyer sits in Advanced, and $276,000 against $4.01M is 6.88%. The same is true higher up: just past $10M the effective rate is 5.03%, and just past $20M it is 3.78%.

So the identical product, bought by two identical companies, carries an effective rate somewhere between 2.16% and 6.88% depending on nothing but where their spend happens to fall relative to a line. That is a 3.2x spread, and it is invisible on the pricing page because the pricing page shows the tiers, not the gaps.

None of this is a trick and Skai are not doing anything improper — every banded product on earth behaves this way, and theirs is at least readable. The point is what it tells you to do: find out where you sit inside your band before you negotiate, not after. A buyer at $4.1M has a far stronger case for a concession than a buyer at $3.9M, and only one of them knows it.

There is a second finding on that same page that matters more than the money. On Skai's published grid, incrementality testing first appears at Enterprise Premier — the $756,000 tier. Read that as a fact about the category rather than about one vendor: measurement of whether advertising caused the sale is frequently a priced upgrade, not a default. Ask every candidate whether it is included, and get the answer in the statement of work rather than in an email.

Run it at your own numbers, and see how many rows stay blank

The calculator below carries the only published rate card in this comparison alongside three vendors who quote on a call. Move the slider to your real monthly media budget.

What it shows is mostly structural, and one of the structural facts is about us. Dr. DSP publishes no price. Neither does Acorn-i, and neither does Quartile. Skai does. On pricing transparency specifically, Skai is ahead of all three of us, and we would rather write that sentence than let you find it out later.

We can say exactly what our model is, which is the next best thing. Dr. DSP is a demo, the first 30 days free, and pricing agreed on the call against your real media budget and the scope of work — with Orbit, the full software suite, included at no additional cost. Our sibling product Dr. PPC does publish: $300 a month plus 3% of ad spend, capped, month-to-month, with the first 30 days free. If you want a published number from us today, that is where it is, and it is a fair guide to how we think about pricing generally.

The reason Dr. DSP has no equivalent published figure is that display budgets and scopes vary far more than sponsored-ads budgets do — an account running $30,000 a month of DSP against one running $400,000 is not the same job with a bigger number attached. That is an explanation, not an excuse. If a published price is what decides your shortlist, Skai's page is the one to open.

What you can reasonably demand of any partner who quotes on a call, us included, is that the shape of the fee is stated before the number is. "We charge a percentage of working media, invoiced separately, with no minimum term" is a sentence any honest partner can say in the first five minutes, and it lets you compare three candidates before any of them has quoted. If a partner will not describe the architecture until they have seen your budget, that is worth noticing — not because it is sinister, but because it means the number is being set by what you can pay rather than by what the work costs, and you should know which conversation you are in.

What the media itself costs, before anyone's fee

Fees are the smaller half of the budget conversation and they get almost all of the attention. The larger half is what the inventory costs and what it returns, and there are two published anchors worth having.

Amazon's own floor. Amazon's DSP product page states that the managed-service option "typically requires a minimum spend of $50,000", with the minimum varying by country, while self-service customers have full control over their campaigns. That single sentence reshapes a lot of shortlists: below roughly that level, a managed partner with its own seat is not a preference, it is the only route in.

And our own floor, which is lower and rather less flattering. Below roughly $10,000 to $15,000 a month of display budget we tell brands to put the money somewhere other than Amazon DSP. That is standing guidance we give prospects, and it loses us business regularly. Under that level the audiences do not accumulate enough signal to separate a working line item from noise inside any window a brand will wait for, and the reporting overhead is out of proportion to the budget. Every vendor in this category gets asked where the floor is and almost none publish an answer, so that is ours. If your budget sits below it, the honest sequence is sponsored ads first and display later.

What the auction actually costs. From our own live Amazon DSP API pull across 30 advertisers in July 2026: 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM and a blended $1.42 cost per click, producing 6.04x return on ad spend, a $5.49 blended cost per acquisition across 57,137 attributed purchases, and 20.1% of those purchases from shoppers new to the brand. That is one slice of one month, not a promise, and it is scoped exactly as measured — 30 advertisers, July 2026.

One caution about that CPM, because it is the figure buyers anchor on hardest: a blended CPM is an average over inventory that behaves nothing alike. In a separate pull — a different window and a different advertiser set, 27 seats across the 31 days to 14 August 2026, where the blended rate was a $3.71 CPM — Alexa device inventory on its own delivered 34.9% of every impression for 3.0% of the spend, at a $0.32 CPM. Nearly 69 million impressions for under $22,000. It is the cheapest inventory in the account and the easiest to misread, because it inflates the impression count in any report that does not break out supply source. Which makes “what CPM do you buy at” a weaker question than it sounds. “Show me CPM by supply source” is the one that tells you what you actually bought.

Put those together and the fee conversation shrinks to its proper size. On $100,000 a month of media, one undisclosed percentage point is $12,000 a year. That is real money and worth negotiating. It is also less than the difference between a $4.00 CPM and a $6.00 CPM on the same budget, which nobody asks about at all. Ask both.

The question underneath both of them is whether the display spend produced sales that would not otherwise have happened. Last-click attribution cannot answer that, because it can only see the clicks it already got credit for. Holdouts and matched controls can, and Amazon Marketing Cloud is where the reconciliation between DSP and sponsored ads actually happens.

Read the contract, not the feature grid

The most decision-relevant document any vendor in this category publishes is not the pricing page. It is the terms of service, and almost nobody reads them — including the people writing cost articles.

Quartile publishes theirs openly, which is more than most of their peers do, and it is worth using as the worked example precisely because it is legible. Their terms set an initial term of one year from the effective date, automatically renewing "on each anniversary of the Effective Date for successive one-year periods". Either party may decline to renew by giving written notice at least sixty days before expiry. Fees are "due in advance of Services rendered" and the client "shall not be entitled to any refund in connection with any termination". There is a defined sixty-day Evaluation Period from the effective date during which the client can terminate via a designated button, and outside it early termination means paying the fees that would have been due for the rest of the term. Month-to-month is available, but as a right Quartile "may, in its sole discretion, grant certain Clients", with thirty days' notice.

None of that is unusual or improper. It is a normal enterprise contract, and publishing it is a point in their favour. The point is that those clauses decide more of your risk than any feature list, and no ranking article about the cost of anything in this space quotes them.

So take this to every candidate, Acorn-i and us included:

• Term and renewal. Month-to-month, or an annual term that renews itself? How many days' notice, in what form, to which address?
• Inclusive or exclusive. Is your media budget net of the fee, or is the fee invoiced separately?
• What the percentage is charged on. Total account spend, or only the media that partner manages?
• Who designs and computes the incrementality test, and is it named in the statement of work rather than described on a call?
• Fee changes. Get written notice of any change in fees, from any partner including us.
• Data portability. On exit, what leaves with you — the audience definitions, the AMC queries, the creative, the performance history?
• Change of control. This category has consolidated hard for four years. Ask what happens to your rate if the company is acquired.

Two places to go next, and only if the description fits. If the honest answer is that display is not yet the constraint and sponsored ads are, Dr. PPC publishes its price and starts there. If you are weighing Acorn-i against the wider field rather than pricing it in isolation, our breakdown of the four kinds of Acorn-i replacement sets out who each one genuinely suits.

Dr. DSP is a product of Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands, and Orbit is included with it at no extra cost.