The Trade Desk pricing — no rate card, but there is arithmetic

What we checked, and what it returned

Everything in this section was checked on 20 August 2026 and is reproducible in a browser in about ninety seconds.

• thetradedesk.com/pricing returns HTTP 404. So does thetradedesk.com/us/pricing.
• The homepage carries no price. It describes the product as "The leading independent DSP built for data-driven marketers" and routes to "Get started" and "Contact us".
• There is no published minimum spend, no self-service tier, and no rate card anywhere we could find on their own domain.

State that neutrally, because it deserves to be stated neutrally: The Trade Desk quotes on a call. That is completely normal for enterprise programmatic, where fees are negotiated against volume and contract length, and it is the same position taken by Pacvue, Intentwise, Quartile, Criteo and Rithum. It is also, for the avoidance of doubt, our own position on Dr. DSP.

One clarification before the numbers, since this page will be read by Amazon sellers. Amazon DSP is the Demand-Side Platform, Amazon's programmatic buying system — not the Delivery Service Partner parcel franchise. And The Trade Desk is a different DSP entirely: an independent one, not Amazon's, and not the route to Amazon retail signal or Amazon Marketing Cloud. If you arrived here comparing the two on price, the more useful comparison is what each one can measure, and that section is further down.

What follows is not a leak or a rumour. Every figure comes from documents The Trade Desk published itself, which is a luxury this category almost never offers.

The structure, which outlives any number

Prices change; architecture rarely does. The Trade Desk's cost has four layers, and only the first one is what people mean when they ask what it costs.

• The platform fee. A share of the media transacted through the platform, agreed in contract. Larger commitments and longer terms get better rates; that is how enterprise software works everywhere.
• Data and audience costs. Third-party segments, identity resolution and any data marketplace usage carry their own charges. These are frequently the layer that surprises people, because they scale with how sophisticated your targeting gets.
• Measurement and verification. Brand safety, viewability, attribution and any incrementality work bought through partners are separate line items.
• Supply-path costs. What the exchanges and SSPs take before the money reaches the publisher. The Trade Desk has done real, public work on supply-path transparency, which is a genuine strength — but it means the topic exists and belongs in your model.

The practical consequence: a quoted platform fee is not your cost of working with a DSP. Two agencies quoting the same platform percentage can produce materially different all-in costs depending on which of the other three layers they include, absorb, or bill through at cost.

So the question to put in writing to anyone selling you programmatic — The Trade Desk's resellers, an agency, or us — is not "what is your percentage". It is: list every line that will appear on an invoice, say which of them is a pass-through at cost, and confirm whether my stated media budget is inclusive or exclusive of all of it. That is one email, and it separates the quotes properly.

The one number you can compute from primary sources

The Trade Desk is publicly traded, which means it publishes figures no private vendor in this category does. That permits an arithmetic nobody else on this page allows.

From The Trade Desk's own fiscal 2025 results release: full-year revenue of $2.896 billion, up 18% year over year, against $13.4 billion of gross spend on the platform. Divide the first by the second:

• $2.896B ÷ $13.4B = 21.6%. That is the company-wide implied take on money transacted across the platform in 2025.

Now the cautions, which matter more than the figure and are the reason most articles quoting a take rate get it wrong.

It is an average, not a quote. It blends every client from the largest agency holding companies — who negotiate rates a single advertiser will never see — to small buyers with no leverage. Your number will be different and there is no honest way to guess in which direction from this figure alone.

It is not purely a platform fee. Company revenue includes elements beyond a simple percentage of media, so treating 21.6% as "the platform fee" overstates what that specific line costs. What the figure legitimately tells you is the total economics of the platform per dollar transacted — which is a genuinely useful reference and is exactly the kind of thing a private vendor can never be checked on.

The same release reports customer retention "over 95% during the year, as it has for the past twelve consecutive years". Worth doing the compounding on that, because it is a stronger claim than it looks: 95% retained annually leaves 54% of a cohort still present after twelve years. Whatever their pricing is, clients are not leaving over it.

What one point costs, in money rather than percentages

Percentages are hard to feel and easy to concede in a negotiation. Convert them.

At $100,000 a month of media — $1.2M a year — one percentage point of fee is $12,000 a year. Two points is $24,000. At $500,000 a month, one point is $60,000 a year. Those are hiring-decision numbers, and they are decided in a five-minute conversation that most buyers do not prepare for.

Now convert it into the thing you were actually trying to buy. Across 30 advertisers in July 2026, our own live Amazon DSP API pull recorded a $4.00 CPM. At that rate, $12,000 of fee is 3 million impressions you paid for and did not receive. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on what the platform does with the impressions you did get — which is a real argument for paying a good platform well, and a bad reason to skip the negotiation.

There is a second conversion worth running, because it reframes the whole exercise. At the same $100,000 a month, moving your CPM from $4.00 to $5.00 costs you 20% of your impressions — the equivalent of about twenty percentage points of fee. Almost nobody negotiates the media rate with the same energy they bring to the fee. If you only have appetite for one hard conversation, the media rate is usually the larger prize.

For comparison, and because it is the only published rate card in the neighbourhood: Skai's tiers, read on skai.io on 20 August 2026, run $114,000 a year up to $4M of annual media, $276,000 up to $10M, $504,000 up to $20M and $756,000 up to $35M. At the top of each band that is 2.85%, 2.76%, 2.52% and 2.16% of media respectively. Different product, different job, and a useful sense of what a licence-shaped fee looks like when someone prints it.

That comparison also exposes the structural trade nobody names in these negotiations. A fixed licence and a percentage of media fail in opposite directions. A licence rewards you for growing — at $4M of media Skai Standard is 2.85%, and at $1M the identical invoice is 11.40% — while a percentage never punishes a small year but never gets cheaper in a big one. Neither shape is virtuous. Work out which way your next two years are likely to move before you decide which one feels safer, because the instinct to prefer a predictable number is usually an instinct about accounting rather than about cost.

One last habit that catches errors on any vendor with a term sheet: take whatever annual figure you are quoted, divide it by twelve, and check it against the monthly figure in the same conversation. If the two do not match, you are being shown two billing bases and should ask which is which before you compare anything. That single division has caught more mistakes in our own research than any amount of scepticism about vendors, and we have been on the wrong end of it ourselves.

Where an Amazon-first brand should actually be looking

If you sell primarily on Amazon, the pricing question is the second question and the first one is which platform can answer the thing you actually want to know.

The Trade Desk is excellent at buying reach across the open internet and connected TV, independently of any single retailer. That is its job and it does it at enormous scale. It is not the path into Amazon's shopping signal or into Amazon Marketing Cloud, where event-level data from Amazon DSP and sponsored ads sits together and can be reconciled. Amazon's own DSP page says as much in its own terms: you "can also perform custom analysis on your Amazon DSP campaigns using event-level datasets in Amazon Marketing Cloud".

That matters because of the question underneath every display budget: did this advertising cause sales that would not otherwise have happened? Last-click attribution cannot answer it — it only sees the conversions it already claimed credit for. A holdout or a matched control can, and running one requires a clean room with the retail events in it.

Amazon's page also states the practical entry point: the managed-service option "typically requires a minimum spend of $50,000", varying by country, while self-service customers "have full control over their campaigns". Below the managed floor, working through a partner who already holds a seat is generally the route in.

So the honest shortlist logic for an Amazon-first brand: if your growth problem is reach beyond Amazon's ecosystem, The Trade Desk is a serious answer and its pricing is negotiable against volume. If your growth problem is whether Amazon display is adding incremental orders, buy where the clean room is, and buy the measurement design before you buy the media.

What Dr. DSP costs, and where we lose on this

Fair is fair. Dr. DSP publishes no price either. We have spent this page pointing out that The Trade Desk's rate card does not exist, and ours does not either — Skai publishes four exact annual figures and is straightforwardly ahead of both of us on transparency. A reader who noticed that before we said it would have been right to stop believing the rest of the page.

What we can state exactly is the model. 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 the work, month to month, with Orbit — the full software suite — included at no additional cost. Orbit is not a DSP and we are not going to pretend it substitutes for one. Our sibling product Dr. PPC does publish: $300 a month plus 3% of ad spend, capped, month-to-month, first 30 days free, and it is a fair guide to how the group thinks about fees.

What you get for it: Amazon DSP run daily by Fable 5, supervised by operators from Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands. You choose the autonomy level, and every change carries the evidence behind it, a measurement plan and a rollback trigger before it runs.

The book, scoped honestly: across 30 advertisers in July 2026 the API pull showed 6.04x return on ad spend, 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM, a blended $1.42 cost per click, a $5.49 cost per acquisition across 57,137 attributed purchases, and 20.1% of those purchases from shoppers new to the brand. Thirty advertisers, one month. Not the whole book, and not a promise.

What to ask for in writing, from anyone including us

When nobody publishes a price, the contract is the price. Read it instead of the feature grid.

The clearest published example in this category belongs to Quartile, and it is worth quoting precisely because they made it readable: a one-year initial term that "shall automatically renew on each anniversary of the Effective Date for successive one-year periods"; sixty days' written notice of non-renewal; fees "due in advance of Services rendered"; no refund "in connection with any termination"; a sixty-day Evaluation Period from the effective date during which the client can terminate from inside the product; and month-to-month available only as a right they "may, in [their] sole discretion, grant certain Clients". Nothing improper there — it is a normal enterprise contract, and publishing it is more than most peers do.

Take this list to every programmatic conversation:

• Every invoice line, named. Platform fee, data, audiences, measurement, verification, supply-path — and which are pass-through at cost.
• Inclusive or exclusive. Is my stated media budget net of your fees?
• Basis. Is the percentage charged on total spend, or only on media you manage?
• Term, renewal and notice. How many days, in what form, to which address. Diary it the week you sign.
• Fee changes. Written notice of any change, from any vendor including us.
• Measurement ownership. Who designs the incrementality test, who computes it, and is it in the statement of work?
• Data portability. On exit: audience logic, queries, creative, and line-item history.
• Change of control. What happens to your rate if the company is acquired.

Two places to go next. If you want the product assessment rather than the fee structure, our review of The Trade Desk for Amazon advertisers covers what it is genuinely excellent at and where it stops. If your spend is mostly sponsored ads today and display is the next step rather than the current problem, Dr. PPC publishes its price and is the cheaper place to start.