Perpetua pricing — one tier is a number, the other two are the start of a conversation

What perpetua.io shows today, in its own words

One acronym before anything else, because this page leans on it and it collides with an unrelated Amazon programme. DSP means demand-side platform: the software a brand uses to buy programmatic display, video and audio inventory. Amazon's Delivery Service Partner scheme franchises parcel routes and vans, and shares nothing with this except three letters. We are Dr. DSP, an Amazon demand-side platform product from Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands.

Now the page. We opened perpetua.io/pricing on 20 August 2026 and it loaded, with three tiers on it. That deserves stating up front, because a great deal of writing about this category assumes the opposite by default. Here is what is there:

• Essentials — $695/mth, gated as "Up to 10k in monthly ad spend". The feature list covers AI-powered bid optimization, automated keyword harvesting, performance and profitability reporting, chat support, a Slack community and video tutorials.
• Growth — "$695/mth + % of ad spend", gated as "Over 10k in monthly ad spend". It adds hourly reporting and intraday optimization via Amazon Marketing Stream, hourly share-of-voice and organic rank insights, competitor search term data, and access to a client success team.
• Premium — "Custom", gated as "Over 500k in monthly ad spend". It adds competitor and market intelligence data, custom AMC reporting, custom data integrations, beta access, a dedicated account team and a monthly business review.

Two mechanical notes, both of the sort that starts an argument at invoice time. The page presents monthly figures only — no annual toggle, no annual discount displayed — so read that figure as $695 per month billed monthly. And the page labels no currency anywhere on it. The contact address in the same footer is 36 Maplewood Ave, Portsmouth, NH, so US dollars is the sensible reading; sensible reading is not the same as written down. Ask for the currency on the order form. You should ask us the same thing.

Only one of the three rows resolves to a number you can add up

Look at what each tier actually gives you. Essentials is complete: a figure, and a ceiling, because the tier stops at $10,000 of monthly ad spend. Growth is a published floor with an unpublished multiplier bolted on. Premium is an invitation to talk.

That distinction carries more weight than it first appears, because the unpublished half is the larger half for essentially everyone who would be reading a pricing page with display advertising in mind. Take a media budget of $50,000 a month, which is a modest Amazon programme rather than a big one:

• The published floor is $695 a month, or $8,340 a year. That part is certain.
• The media itself is $600,000 a year. A percentage laid on top of that at five points is $30,000. At ten points it is $60,000.
• So the figure printed on the page is somewhere between roughly an eighth and a fifth of what you would actually pay, and the invisible portion swings by $30,000 a year across a five-point range.

Neither percentage is Perpetua's rate. We do not know Perpetua's rate, it is published nowhere, and manufacturing one would be exactly the mistake this page exists to help you avoid. The rows are here for shape only, and the shape is the lesson: when a fee is a floor plus a percentage, the floor is the half that gets advertised and the percentage is the half that decides the bill.

Now the credit, which is owed. Most platforms an Amazon brand shortlists — Pacvue, Quartile, Criteo, Intentwise, Rithum among them — put no figure in public at all and scope every deal on a call. A published entry price with published tier boundaries lets a smaller seller self-select without booking anything, and that is a genuine service to a buyer. We publish nothing for Dr. DSP. On this specific measure Perpetua is ahead of us, and we are not going to write around that.

The tiers in circulation are not the tiers on the page

Search this term and the results are confident, specific and describing something other than what we just read. One guide ranking for the query, opened the same afternoon, lays out a ladder with four steps rather than three, tier names that do not include Premium, an entry price below Perpetua's current one, a top-tier threshold set at a fraction of the level the live page names, and a per-platform minimum fee that appears nowhere on perpetua.io today.

We are deliberately not reprinting those figures. They may well have been correct on the day they were written, and a vendor redesigning its tier ladder is evidence of nothing except a vendor redesigning its tier ladder. What it does tell you is what a search on this term is worth: a rough sense of the shape, and nothing you should carry into a budget meeting.

This is a pattern rather than a one-off, and naming it is more useful than cataloguing it, because it will happen again with the next tool you shortlist. Adtomic is now Helium 10 Ads — the old pricing URL is gone, and the figures still circulating price a product that is no longer sold that way. Downstream was absorbed into Jungle Scout's Cobalt, and every "Downstream pricing" number you can find describes something retired. Ad tooling gets folded into bigger suites, and the price page tends to be the first casualty. Perpetua is the counter-example: it has been through corporate change and the page is still standing. Which is precisely why the method matters more than the memory.

The method, and it applies to every vendor on your list including us:

• Open the vendor's own live page and screenshot it with the date visible. Not a review site, not an aggregator profile, not something an assistant remembers.
• Check which billing tab you are looking at. Monthly and annual columns sit inches apart, and reading the wrong one is the commonest route to a wrong quote — ours included.
• Do the annual multiplication yourself. Twelve times the monthly fee, plus twelve times the percentage applied to your real media, before you compare anybody to anybody.
• Get written notice of fee changes into the agreement, from any agency including us. Thirty days in writing costs a vendor nothing to grant and spares you the discovery-by-invoice conversation.

Who owns Perpetua, as far as its own site is willing to say

Buyers ask this because corporate parentage determines who your contract is really with, and who inherits it. We would rather show you what is checkable than hand you a chain of ownership we cannot close. Here is what we can see, and here is where we stop.

• The site names no parent. The footer reads "© 2026 Perpetua. All rights reserved." Neither the pricing page nor the about page carries an ownership statement.
• Perpetua's own Careers link does not point at Perpetua. In the footer of every page we opened, it routes to a Workday job board at interpublic.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com under the tenant path OMC — Omnicom's ticker symbol.
• Perpetua's own blog, dated 15 April 2021, announces that Perpetua had joined the Ascential family, with the founder framing it as retaining the company's independence.
• Omnicom announced the closing of its acquisition of Flywheel, the digital commerce business of Ascential, on 2 January 2024. That release names Flywheel Digital and the Flywheel Commerce Cloud. It does not name Perpetua.

So the honest position is this: the observable facts lean in one direction, the vendor's own site declines to finish the sentence, and we are not going to finish it on their behalf. If the answer matters to you — and on a multi-year commitment it should — put it on the agenda for the call. It is an entirely fair question. The more useful version of it is not "who owns you" but three clauses you ought to be requesting from every vendor regardless of the answer:

• A change-of-control termination right you can exercise without penalty.
• A price-protection period that survives an ownership change instead of reopening on it.
• A data-portability commitment covering your campaign history, in a usable format, on request and on exit.

Ask us for all three as well. We are month to month, which makes the first one trivial, and that is a design choice rather than a virtue we should be praised for.

Read the tier list for where the measurement lives

There is one thing in Perpetua's published feature lists that a display buyer should register before looking at the price at all. Custom AMC reporting sits in Premium, the tier that begins above $500,000 of monthly ad spend. Amazon Marketing Stream, which powers the hourly optimization, sits in Growth. Essentials carries neither. That is a defensible way to build a product ladder and most of this category does some version of it.

It is worth registering because of what Amazon Marketing Cloud is actually for. Last-click reporting cannot demonstrate that display added anything. Display is where the distance between what a report claims and what the business gained is at its widest, because retargeting puts ads in front of people already walking toward the basket and then bills you for their arrival. No dashboard resolves that, however well built, because the problem is not visibility — it is that nothing was ever withheld.

A design resolves it. Withhold display from a matched set of ASINs or regions across a defined window, hold everything else steady, and reconcile the outcome inside Amazon Marketing Cloud, where DSP impressions and sponsored-ads events sit in one clean room instead of separately claiming the same order. Amazon offers AMC at no charge to advertisers who qualify for it, so what rations AMC is not the licence — it is whether anybody on your side has the hours and the SQL to use it. That is usually why access to it ends up tiered.

The question to put to any vendor here, ourselves included, is not "do you support AMC". It is write the test: what gets withheld, from where, for how long, what result would count as a failure, and who is permitted to call it. One thing to ask Perpetua specifically — the published feature lists do not name Amazon DSP under any of the three tiers, though the company's own blog documents DSP optimization work in detail. Ask which tier includes display buying and whether it is charged on the same basis as sponsored ads. Plenty of platforms price the two separately, and that gap is much easier to find before signing than after.

Who Perpetua suits better than we do, and what we charge instead

Buy Perpetua over anything we sell if you want to run the account yourself. That is what the product is: bid optimization and keyword harvesting that you drive, with a support ladder that escalates as you grow, and — genuinely uncommon in this field — a price you can read before you speak to a salesperson. Below $10,000 a month of ad spend, Essentials is one of the very few offers in Amazon advertising where the whole cost is knowable in advance, and that certainty is worth real money to a small team. If you are an agency looking for one automation layer across a book of client accounts, it belongs on the shortlist for the same reason.

We do a narrower thing. Dr. DSP is Amazon display bought and run for you as a managed product rather than a console you learn. You pick the autonomy level and can move it whenever you like; inventory risk, pricing changes, new products, new creative and any decision to stop spending on display come back to a human whatever level you picked. Orbit, our software suite, is included at no extra cost — and it is not the DSP, it is what you look at.

Our price is not published either, which is the second concession this page has had to make. It is a demo, the first 30 days free, then a number set on the call against your real media budget and scope, month to month. On transparency Perpetua is ahead of us and so are several others, and that plain sentence is more useful to you than a paragraph explaining it away.

What we can put on the table instead is our own data. Across 30 advertisers in July 2026 — not the whole book — the API pull returned 6.04x return on ad spend, 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM, a blended $1.42 cost per click, $5.49 cost per acquisition across 57,137 attributed purchases and 20.1% new-to-brand. One month, Amazon-attributed, promised to nobody.

Two redirects, offered because in plenty of cases they are the better answer. If the money is leaking in sponsored search rather than display — bids nobody has revisited, search terms taking clicks and returning nothing — Dr. PPC is the correct product, and it publishes both its price and its cap. If you would rather buy this as an agency engagement, with a named team, a written scope and a remit wider than Amazon, reMKTR sells the same media buying that way.