The most common misunderstanding about ad management is the money. Two amounts are involved, they go to different places, and confusing them makes it impossible to judge whether the ads are working.
What you spend to show ads is paid by you, on your own card, in your own ad account. You set the cap and you can see every dollar. It does not pass through me, and it is not part of any monthly plan.
Keeping it that way matters for a practical reason: the account, the pixel, the audiences and the history stay yours. If we stop working together, none of that goes with me.
The monthly fee covers everything that is not the media spend:
Plans differ by volume, not by attention: Starter is $269.90 a month with 2 campaigns and 2 of each creative, Growth is $499.90 with 3 campaigns and 4 of each, Pro is $699.90 with 5 campaigns and 6 of each plus priority turnaround.
Targeting on Meta has become largely automatic. What still separates a campaign that works from one that does not is the creative: the first frame, the first two seconds, whether the offer is legible without sound. That is why creative production is inside the plan rather than quoted per piece.
Ads buy attention. What you do with that attention is the creative, and the page it lands on.
If the landing page is slow, unclear or has no obvious way to get in touch, ads amplify the leak. On a $500 monthly budget that is real money spent to send people to a page that will not convert them. Fixing the landing page first usually costs less than a month of wasted budget. Sometimes the honest answer to "should I run ads" is "fix the page first, then run ads".
Not by likes, and not by reach. Two numbers matter: what a lead costs you, and what share of leads turn into paid work. Everything else is context. If those two numbers do not make sense for your business after a fair test, the right decision is to stop, and I will tell you that rather than keep billing.
Tell me the trade and the towns you cover. I will tell you what I would do first.