Free software, paid in time
Revive is free, open source and self-hosted. It gives advertisers a read-only login rather than a self-serve one, so every buyer journey still lands back on you, and its price is paid in hours rather than dollars.
Thirty dollars, or an evening a month.Put your own numbers in, because ours are only arithmetic. Say the server takes two hours a month: updates, backups, the odd delivery problem. That is twenty-four hours a year. At 40 dollars an hour, self-hosting costs around 960 dollars a year in time, against 360 dollars for a hosted plan at 29.99 a month. Change either input and the answer changes. Illustrative figures, not a survey. The same sum across the rest of the market is in what a white-label ad server really costs.
What Revive is
A self-hosted ad server in PHP with a MySQL database, under an open source licence, descended from phpAdsNew and the old OpenX Source project.
It covers the serving: advertisers and campaigns, zones and banners, weighting, impression and click counting, reporting, targeting through plugins.
What it does not do is sell. Every advertiser still comes through you.
What Pyrobid is
Pyrobid is a hosted white-label ad server with a self-serve advertiser portal on your own domain. Advertisers register, pay, upload artwork and pull their own reports without you in the loop.
Revive assumes the publisher is the operator. Pyrobid assumes the advertiser is.
That is the whole difference. The rest of this page is what follows from it.
What free leaves you to build
Revive covers the ad serving. The part that makes money is still yours to write.
A portal advertisers can buy from
Revive hands an advertiser a read-only login with three tabs. Nobody signs up through it, funds an account, uploads a creative or bids. Pyrobid is a shop front in your name: they register, pay and go live themselves, at three in the morning, without you in the loop.
Getting paid without writing an invoice
Card payments, balances, vouchers and receipts are in the product. With Revive you are the billing system. Your invoice, your chasing, your reconciliation, every month, for every advertiser you ever sign.
Somebody else keeping it up
Revive is yours to host, patch, back up and keep serving on a Sunday night. Pyrobid is a subscription and an ad tag. The evening you were going to spend on a PHP upgrade goes into selling instead.
Side by side
Revive details are the project description of itself, accessed 16 September 2026.
$29.99/mo
|
ReviveFree, self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| The money | ||
| Software licence | $29.99/mo to one million | Free and open source |
| Impression ceiling | $99.99/mo to five million | None |
| Hosting and database | Included | Yours to run |
| Revenue share on direct deals | None, ever | None, ever |
| The work | ||
| Self-serve advertiser portal | Included | Not offered |
| An advertiser login | They register themselves | You create it, password and all |
| Advertiser signup and payment | They do it | You do it, out of band |
| Creative upload | They do it | You load the banner |
| Month end reporting | They pull their own | They can, once you make them a login |
| Security releases and backups | Ours | Yours |
| Time to the first live ad | About five minutes | A server install first |
| Control and exit | ||
| The database | Reports and CSV export | Direct, it is your MySQL |
| The software itself | Fixed | Open, change it |
| A vendor who can suspend you | Us | Nobody |
| If you stop paying | The tags stop | Nothing expires |
Where Pyrobid wins
One thing, mostly, and then everything that follows from it.
The advertiser serves themselves
They register, pay, upload a banner and watch it run at two in the morning without waking you. Revive can give them a login to read the numbers with. It has none to buy with.
Nobody has to patch anything
An ad server is public and sits in front of every page view. When a security release lands for Revive, applying it is your job. Here it is ours.
Take the money any way you like
Bank transfer, invoice, cash or stablecoin, then a voucher that redeems as ad credit. No merchant account, and no card processor that can veto your industry.
The full targeting set, included
Country, region and city. Device type, brand and model. ISP and carrier. Day-parting in the advertiser timezone, contextual keywords, frequency capping over 24 hours. Nothing is a plugin to find.
Viewability measured on every impression
Billable at 50 per cent of pixels on screen for 300 milliseconds. Our threshold, not the MRC one second standard, as we say on how we count.
One price covers all of it
Portal, branding and the full targeting set in both plans, no share of your direct deals ever. The bill is on the pricing page.
What your advertisers see
Your brand, on your own domain. They sign up, fund an account and build a campaign in five steps. You approve the artwork before anything runs.
Illustration of step one of the advertiser campaign builder, on your own domain under your branding.
A screenshot is still only a picture. The demo is the running product, read only, with the login published and nothing to install.
Choose Pyrobid if
- ›You want advertisers to register, pay and upload artwork without you
- ›You would rather spend 29.99 a month than two hours a month
- ›Patching a public server is not something you want to own
- ›You sell to more than a handful of advertisers, or intend to
Common questions
Why pay 29.99 a month for something Revive does for nothing?
Because they do different things. Revive serves ads. It does not sell them for you: you create every advertiser account and its password, take payment out of band and load the creative, for every advertiser, every month. They can read their own numbers once you have done all that. At ten advertisers that is a part-time job, and it arrives exactly when selling is going well. Pyrobid hands all of it to the advertiser.
Does Revive give advertisers a login?
Yes, and it is worth knowing exactly what it is. You create the username yourself from Inventory, then Advertisers, then User Access, and you set their password for them. They then get a cut-down interface with three tabs: Statistics for their own campaign numbers, Inventory to look at the campaigns and banners you built, and Settings for their own email and password. Revive documents it in their own how-to and advises leaving every extra permission switched off. It is a reporting login, not a buying one. Nobody signs up, funds an account, uploads a creative or bids.
Is Revive out of date?
It is still maintained, and it descends from phpAdsNew and OpenX Source. For a publisher who sells direct, the question is not its age but what it leaves out: there is no way for an advertiser to sign up, pay or upload a creative without you.
Could I build a self-serve portal on top of Revive?
In principle, yes, and people have tried. The source is open, so a developer can build signup, payment, creative upload and reporting on it. That is a build project rather than a weekend, and then it is yours to maintain. See build versus buy.
Which is safer for a crypto, cannabis or gambling site?
Pyrobid supports crypto, cannabis and gambling sites in writing, and no card processor sits between you and your advertisers: they pay you any way you agree and you credit them with a voucher. Self-hosting Revive means no vendor at all, and it also means the servers, updates and security are yours to run.
Can I move off Revive without losing anything?
The tags change and the campaigns are rebuilt, an afternoon rather than a migration, and your history stays in your own database. You can run both: point one zone at Pyrobid and leave the rest. How it works covers the setup.
What the advertiser actually touches
The screen on the left is the real product, on a live tenant. The right is what an advertiser gets from Revive.
Try the paid one. Keep the free one running.
Fourteen days free, and nothing about your Revive install has to change while you look.
Start free trial14 days free. Your existing ads keep running. Cancel anytime.
Revive details here are what the project publishes about itself: free, open source, self-hosted on PHP and MySQL, and descended from phpAdsNew and OpenX Source. The advertiser login, its three tabs and the advice to leave the extra permissions switched off all come from their how-to on giving an advertiser access to their own statistics. Checked 16 September 2026. The cost comparison is labelled arithmetic, not research.