How much does your competitor spend on ads?

An ad budget is private business data, like a company’s prices or its payroll. The public ad libraries exist so anyone can see who is advertising and what they say, not what they pay. The Meta Ad Library, the Google Ads Transparency Center and the LinkedIn Ad Library all show the ads, but not the money behind them.

The one exception is political ads: Meta shows the spend on ads about elections and social issues, and Google shows it for election ads. For a company that sells software, you will not find a spend figure anywhere.

What Meta does publish, because a European law (the Digital Services Act) requires it, is how many people in the EU each ad has reached. That number is where our estimate starts.

The estimate follows that reach number through five steps:

1. Reach. For each live ad shown in the EU, Meta publishes how many people there it has reached since it started. We add that up across the company’s live ads.
2. A month. That number covers each ad’s whole life, so we spread it over the months the ads have run (12 at most) to get the reach in one month.
3. The world. Europe is only part of the audience. We assume it is about 15% of it, which fits a company that sells mostly in the US, and scale the reach up.
4. Views. People see an ad more than once, so we count about 2.2 views per person a month.
5. Price. We multiply the views by a typical price of 1,000 ad views in those countries, taken from public benchmarks.

We round the result to two figures (so $37,412 becomes $37,000), because more precision would be fake. The free checker shows the band the estimate falls in; SaaSpy Pro shows the estimate itself.

Where it can be wrong:

• It covers Meta only: Facebook, Instagram and the rest of Meta’s ad network. Spend on Google, LinkedIn or TikTok is not in it.
• Companies that advertise only outside Europe have no estimate, because Meta publishes reach only for ads shown in Europe.
• For a company that sells mostly in Europe the estimate runs high; for one that barely targets Europe it runs low.
• Real prices change with the audience, the season and how good the ads are.
• It moves when a company starts or stops ads, so compare it over weeks, not on one day.

Treat it as a sign of scale: good for comparing companies and spotting changes, not a bill.

The band alone tells you size. Next to the two other numbers the checker shows, it tells you what they are doing. Here, high spend means $50K a month or more.

How long the ads run matters most. Companies stop ads that lose money, so an ad live for 90 days or more is one that pays for itself. The Competitor Ads Checker shows a company’s longest-running ads.

Then watch the change. A company that moves up a band is putting more money behind what works; one that moves down is pulling back or pausing.

Companies keep paying for ads only while the ads bring in customers worth more than the ads cost. So a competitor that spends $50K or more a month, month after month, is strong proof of two things: people in that market buy, and they pay enough to cover the ads.

It also tells you the price of entry. You will bid in the same auctions for the same people, so expect each click to cost more than in a quiet market.

Big spenders are rare. Of the 6,529 SaaS and app companies SaaSpy can estimate, 3,688 (56%) spend under $1K a month on Meta ads, and only 206 (3%) spend $50K or more (SaaSpy, Oct 30, 2026). A competitor in the top two bands is among the top 3% of the advertisers we can estimate.

No big spenders at all can mean an open market, or one where paid ads do not pay. Look at how long the ads run: ads that last for months mean the channel works; ads that vanish within a week mean it did not.

Setting your own budget? 56% of the companies we can estimate spend under $1K a month on Meta, so a small test is normal, not a sign you are behind.