Quartile pricing — the rate is private, the contract mechanics are not

The pricing page is not where the pricing information is

Search this term and you land on a demo request. That is where most people stop, and it is the wrong place to stop, because Quartile does publish a document that describes how it charges — its terms and conditions. Read on 20 August 2026, that document sets out Standard Pricing Tiers determined by three things: your "aggregate monthly advertising spend ('Ad Spend') in Quartile managed Channels", the "number of advertising platforms ('Channels') that Quartile manages", and the "level of Service agreed upon by Quartile with the Client". The money itself is recorded elsewhere: "The Quartile Fees shall be determined as set forth in the Order Form."

That is more disclosure than most of this category offers, and it deserves credit rather than suspicion. A published fee architecture is genuinely useful even without figures, because architecture is what survives. Rate cards change every year; the shape of the deal rarely does.

A quick disambiguation, since this page and its neighbours use one acronym constantly. When we write DSP we mean a demand-side platform — programmatic buying of display, video and audio. Amazon's Delivery Service Partner programme, which franchises parcel delivery, is a different thing that shares 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.

Three variables that move together, which is the trap

Most buyers read "tiers by ad spend" and mentally file it as one dial. It is three, and they interact in ways that make two quotes look comparable when they are not.

• Aggregate monthly ad spend in managed channels. Note the word aggregate. If Amazon, Walmart and a paid search account are all managed, they add together. A brand spending modestly on Amazon can land in a high band because of everything else in the bundle.
• Number of channels managed. Adding a retailer is not only an incremental fee; it can move you up a tier on the spend variable at the same time, because the new channel's spend joins the aggregate. That is a double step from a decision that felt small.
• Service level. The least visible of the three and often the biggest gap between two proposals. Two quotes at the same spend and channel count can differ substantially on service alone, and "service level" in an order form should be defined as named people, cadence and response times — not as an adjective.

The practical consequence: never compare two quotes on headline price. Compare cost per dollar of managed media, at the same channel count, with the service definition written out in full. A quote that looks cheaper because it manages two channels instead of five is not cheaper, it is smaller.

The calendar is the part people sign without reading

The published terms are specific about time, and time is where commercial pain usually arrives. The initial term runs one year from the effective date, and thereafter the agreement "shall automatically renew on each anniversary of the Effective Date for successive one-year periods". Either party can stop that by giving written notice of non-renewal "at least sixty (60) days prior to the expiration" of the current term. Fees are "due in advance of Services rendered" and are described as "non-cancellable and non-refundable". Payment is in US dollars.

Translate that into a diary and the shape becomes obvious. On a January start, your real decision deadline is the end of October — not December, and certainly not January. Miss it and you own another full year. This is entirely standard for annual enterprise software and it is not a criticism of Quartile; it is a criticism of how most buyers handle it, which is to file the contract and rediscover it eleven months later.

Three things to do on signing day, before the enthusiasm wears off: put the notice deadline in a shared calendar with two reminders, name the person responsible for the renewal decision, and agree internally what evidence would justify renewing. Deciding the evidence standard in month one is much easier than deciding it in month ten while someone is asking for a decision by Friday.

What 'fixed for the term' does and does not protect

The terms state that fees in the order form "shall remain fixed for the duration of that Initial Term or Renewal Term" — with carve-outs for tier upgrades, newly added services, and increases in third-party platform fees. That is a fair and normal set of exceptions, and it is also the list to ask questions about, because each one is a route by which a fixed price moves.

• Tier upgrades. Ask whether crossing a spend or channel threshold triggers an upgrade immediately or at renewal, and whether it can ever move down. Many agreements ratchet in one direction only, and a good quarter can become a permanent cost.
• New services. Ask what is a new service versus an included one. Is adding Amazon DSP alongside sponsored ads a new service? Is a clean-room analysis? Get examples in writing.
• Third-party fee pass-through. Ask what is passed through at cost and what carries a margin, and whether you see the underlying invoice. Pass-through with an undisclosed uplift is the single most common surprise in media contracts.

None of this requires an adversarial conversation. Any competent vendor answers all six questions in ten minutes, and the ones who do are usually the ones worth buying from.

The question the fee structure cannot answer

Here is the thing that no pricing model in this category settles, ours included unless we design for it. Fees keyed to managed spend create a structural preference for more managed spend, and platform reporting rewards the campaigns that look best rather than the ones that add most. Those two facts point the same direction, and the direction is not always toward incremental sales.

Last-click attribution cannot prove incrementality. Retargeting will always post the strongest reported return in a display account, because it shows ads to people already heading for the basket. A system tuned to reported return will buy more of exactly that, and the chart will improve while the business does not. The remedy is not a different fee model — it is a test. Hold display out from a matched set of regions or ASINs, run a defined window, and reconcile in Amazon Marketing Cloud, where DSP impressions and sponsored-ads events sit in one clean room instead of separately claiming the same order. Amazon makes AMC available free to eligible advertisers, so the barrier is analyst time rather than licence cost.

Ask any vendor — including us — to put the test design in the proposal. Not the promise of measurement. The design: what is withheld, from where, for how long, and what result would count as a failure.

Where Quartile fits, and what we do instead

Quartile is the better purchase when you run many retail networks and want one automated bidding layer applied consistently across all of them, and when you value a responsive account team over a console you drive yourself. Its published terms are more transparent than most of the field, and the tier logic — spend, channels, service — is a rational way to price a service business. Buyers with large catalogues across several marketplaces should have it on the shortlist.

Dr. DSP is narrower on purpose. We do Amazon display, run as a managed product, with no published price: a demo, the first 30 days free, priced on the call against your real media budget and scope, month to month, and Orbit included at no extra cost. You set the autonomy level and can move it any time. Inventory risk, pricing, new products, new creative and the decision to stop spending on display always come to a human, whatever level you pick.

Instead of a rate card, a reference point: across 30 advertisers in July 2026 — not the whole book — 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 on 57,137 attributed purchases, 20.1% new-to-brand. Amazon-attributed, one month, guaranteed to nobody.

Two honest redirects. If your problem is really sponsored ads — wasted search terms, bids nobody has revisited — Dr. PPC is the right product and publishes what it charges. If you would rather buy this as an agency engagement with a named team and a scope of work, reMKTR sells the same media buying that way.