Who is this actually for?

Mostly direct-to-consumer brands selling a physical product online — skincare, supplements, apparel, home, pet, beverage, fitness. That’s what the pipeline is built around: we work from your reviews, your product photography, and your TikTok, Reels and paid results. We do take work outside it — there’s software work in the grid above — but if you’re B2B, an app, a service, or a local business, say so at intake and we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right shop before you pay anything.

Is this organic content or paid ads?

Both, and that’s the point of buying it in one place. The same angle gets cut for your feed and for your ad account, and what wins in one tells us what to make for the other. Most brands run these as two disconnected workstreams and pay twice for the privilege.

Who owns the content?

You do, outright, the day it lands. Full commercial rights on every platform, forever, with no expiry, no renewal fee, and nothing to re-license. Worth being precise about, because a creator deal is a licence, not a sale — those rights typically run out after 6 or 12 months, and extending them costs you again. Ours don’t run out, and nothing you have bought can be taken back.

Why so few videos? Everyone else offers more.

Because more stopped being the hard part. A hundred videos a month from a pipeline that isn’t reading your results is a hundred videos you have to sort through yourself. We’d rather send twelve we can defend and tell you which four to put money behind.

How fast is the first batch?

We start the day your brief lands — there is no queue and no kickoff call to schedule. Three business days for the $50 batch, five for Test and Growth, ten for Partner.

What if I hate the first batch?

It cost you $50, so not much is at stake. On any package: email us within 30 days and we refund it in full, and you keep the files either way.

Can you match my brand guidelines?

Yes. Send them at intake. Fonts, colors, tone, claims you can’t make, words you can’t say.

Do you post it for us?

We hand you a calendar and files scheduled against it, and we’ll load them into your scheduler if you give us access. We don’t take over your accounts and we don’t manage your ad spend — your buyer or your in-house team keeps that. If you want someone to run the media too, say so and we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re it.

With AI. The actors are AI characters and the footage isn’t filmed — that’s how the price sits under one creator’s day rate. It isn’t what you’re buying: you’re buying the angles, the formats, the cadence, and a human who decides what dies this week. We label AI content per Meta and TikTok’s requirements and we don’t produce fake testimonials or put words in the mouth of anyone claiming to be a real customer. That line isn’t negotiable.

Some AI video does, and most of the cheap stuff does. We spend most of our production effort on the things that give it away — the speech cadence above all, then hands, faces, text on screen, the grade. Watch the work above and decide for yourself. That grid is the honest answer to this question.

Why not just buy Arcads or Creatify and do this myself?

You should, if you have someone in-house who will decide the angles, write the scripts from your reviews, sit through the renders, cut the tells, and read the results every week to decide what dies. The tool is about $110 a month and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. You’re paying us for the person and the plan, not the model.

Meta generates video for free inside Ads Manager. Why pay you anything?

Because free generation gets you variations of what you already have, and it has no opinion about what to make next. It’s a good reason not to pay anyone for raw volume — which is exactly why we don’t sell it.

Can you promise me a viral hit?

No, and anyone who does is lying to you. Nobody can name the video that pops. What you can do is aim well and take enough shots — angles pulled from what your buyers actually say, formats that already work in your category, and a cadence that gives the algorithm something to chew on. Then read what travelled and make more of it. That’s the whole method, and it’s the closest honest thing to a strategy for going viral.

Do I need to send product samples?

No. We work from your product photography and website. Nothing ships anywhere.

What if my product is regulated?

Tell us at intake. We work in supplements, skincare, and finance, and we’ll write to your compliance constraints. We won’t make claims your legal team hasn’t cleared — and in a few of those categories we’ll tell you to hire a real creator instead.

Do I have to commit to anything?

No. Every package is a one-off — you buy a batch, we deliver it, and that is the end of it unless you buy another. No subscription, no notice period, no card kept on file, nothing to cancel.

Notes

Arcads Pricing vs. Thousand Ads: What $110/Month in Software Actually Costs You in Time

Published 21 August 2026

You should buy the tool if you have someone who'll do the job around it. The $110 is real; so is the twenty hours a month it assumes you have.

The tool is not the expensive part

Arcads is a good product and its pricing is public — around $110 a month for the tier most brands land on. We're not going to pretend otherwise, and if you have someone in-house who will run it properly, you should buy it instead of buying us. That's a real recommendation, not a rhetorical one.

What the subscription doesn't include is the job. Generation is one step in a process with about six of them, and it's the step that got cheap.

The steps the subscription doesn't cover

Deciding the angles. Not brainstorming them — deriving them from your reviews, your comments and your competitors' comment sections.
Writing scripts in the language your buyers actually use, rather than the language the prompt box encourages.
Sitting through renders and culling. Most generated output is not usable; someone has to watch all of it and decide.
Cutting the tells — speech cadence first, then hands, faces, on-screen text, the grade. This is where most of the production effort goes.
Cutting every format and aspect ratio the platforms want.
Reading the results weekly and deciding what dies. This is the step people skip, and it's the one that makes the rest worth anything.

Put a number on it

Call it twenty hours a month to do that properly for one product — conservative if you're testing seriously. At a marketing salary that's somewhere north of $1,000 a month of loaded cost sitting on top of the $110 subscription, and it's the part that doesn't show up when you compare a software price to a service price.

The failure mode isn't that the tool is bad. It's that the twenty hours don't exist, so the seat gets used for a fortnight, produces a folder of files nobody shipped, and renews for eight months.

Who should buy which

Buy the software if you have a person whose job this is, or if you're a shop that wants to build the capability in-house. You'll be cheaper than us at volume and you'll own the process.

Buy a service if the twenty hours a month aren't there, or if what you actually want is someone to tell you which four of the twelve to put money behind. That's the thing being sold — the person and the plan, not the model.

There's a fuller side-by-side in Thousand Ads vs Arcads, and an honest account of the operational load in what it takes to run the software well. Our own prices are on the pricing page.