What a White-Label Ad Server Really Costs

Entry prices for a white-label ad server run from roughly $29 to roughly $500 a month. The advertised price is often not the price, because the feature most publishers are actually shopping for is usually sold separately.

That feature is the self-serve advertiser portal: the place your buyers register, pay and upload artwork without you. Without it you have bought an ad server and kept the job.

The four charges to look for

Charge	What it is	Typically
Base plan	The server itself, with an impression allowance	Always included, always advertised
Self-serve portal	Where your advertisers buy without talking to you	Frequently an add-on, sometimes with a revenue share attached
Advanced targeting	Geo, device, ISP, day-parting beyond the basics	Often a separate tier
API access	Programmatic control, useful if you are integrating	Usually the most expensive add-on

A platform can be honest about all four and still surprise you, because the advertised figure is the first row alone.

A worked example

AdButler publishes its prices, which is to its credit and makes it useful to work through. These are list prices, checked September 2026, and they change.

Its entry plan is $179 a month for a million ad requests. The self-serve advertiser portal is listed as an add-on at $2,200 plus 3.5 per cent of what flows through it. Advanced targeting starts at $275 a month. API access is listed at $550 a month.

None of that is hidden and none of it is unreasonable for the market it serves, which is larger publishers with an ad ops person. It does mean the answer to "what does it cost" is not $179 for somebody who wants buyers to self-serve.

Every vendor's published price with your own brand on the ad server is side by side on white label ad server pricing, checked October 2026.

What to ask every vendor

That last one catches people. Several platforms cap advertiser accounts at the entry tier, which is a strange thing to limit on a product whose purpose is signing up advertisers.

The range, honestly

Published entry pricing plus the add-ons needed for buyers to purchase without the publisher. Checked September 2026.

Self-hosted is shown at zero because the licence is free. It is not the cheapest option once somebody has to maintain it.

The self-hosted option

Revive is free and open source, and you run it yourself. The licence is the only part of it that costs nothing.

What it costs instead of money: a server, updates, a database you are responsible for, and the fact that it has no self-serve advertiser portal, so the buyer journey lands back on you. Most publishers who try it are not choosing between $0 and $30. They are choosing between $30 and an evening a month. See the full assessment.

What Pyrobid costs, for completeness

$29.99 a month to one million impressions, $99.99 to five million. The self-serve advertiser portal, your own branding and the full targeting set are in both. No revenue share on your direct deals, ever.

That is not free and it is not the cheapest thing on the internet. It is the number, without a second number behind it.