Closed access · for brands and agencies
Ad changes judged on your targets and, where your store data allows, on profit. Approved by a person.
1ads connects Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft Ads to your store and analytics, as each platform approves our access. It checks your campaigns against your own targets every hour, 12 hours or day, depending on your plan and add-ons, and proposes what to change. Nothing runs until someone on your team approves it. One price per brand, not a percentage of your ad spend.
Request accessWill it pay off? Run your numbers →
A person reviews every request. We aim to reply within 5 business days. Contracts and invoices are handled directly with our team.
- Human approval on every change
- Stored in the EU · AI processing in the US (Anthropic), disclosed
- Priced per brand, not per % of spend
- Conservative and expected numbers, sources shown
Your ad platforms are good at spending. They are not neutral judges.
- ROAS counts revenue you never collect. PayU Romania reports that about 11% of cash-on-delivery orders come back (returns and refusals), against 4–5% for card payments. In a shop where 55% of orders are paid on delivery, that is about 6% of the revenue ad platforms count that never becomes cash (worked example; our calculator uses a more cautious 7% of COD orders refused, on 30% COD). (PayU Romania via The Paypers, 2025.)
- Each platform reports on its own results. In 663 Facebook experiments, common non-experimental measurement methods estimated a median lift of 24–64% where the experiments measured 5%. (Gordon, Moakler & Zettelmeyer, Marketing Science, 2023.)
- Tracking breaks while nobody is watching. A conversion tag that breaks on Friday evening can mislead automated bidding all weekend, and a campaign that stops delivering costs you sales until someone notices. (ObservePoint found 5% of tags returning errors, 2023.)
- Five tabs, four logins, approvals by email. Every change is a screenshot, a message and a wait.
From data to an approved decision, in one place
- Connect. Sign in to your ad, analytics and store accounts with OAuth. We never see your passwords. Reading comes first; nothing changes until you approve.
- Set targets. For each ad plan you set the goal and the limit (CPA, ROAS, POAS, cost per lead). 1ads suggests targets from your own last 90 days, never from other customers' data.
- Let Performance Guardian check. Every hour, 12 hours or day, depending on your plan, it gives each campaign a verdict (On target, Watch, Below target, Anomaly) and explains why.
- Approve. Proposals arrive in one inbox, in the app, by email or in Slack. You approve, edit or reject. Agencies can route them through the client's portal.
- Measure. Every approved change is logged with what we expected and what happened. Where your volume allows, we run a guided holdout to see whether a channel is really adding sales, and estimate its cost before you start.
Four things you can check yourself, in the order we would check them
- Tools you can cancel. If you pay separately for ad rules, social publishing, dashboards and profit tracking, 1ads can replace some of them. The saving counts only if you actually cancel them, so the calculator asks you which ones you would, and whether they also feed other reports. We recommend keeping your current tools until the 90-day review.
- Hours your team gets back, at what an hour really costs you. Large studies find AI chatbots save about 3% of working hours on average (up to about 7% for marketers whose employers encourage their use). Your team may already have that. 1ads must add on top, through scheduled checks and reports. We assume 3 hours a month per person in the conservative case and 9 in the expected case, after the time you spend reviewing proposals; in a team, each additional person counts half, because checks and reports are per brand. The expected case is above what those studies found: it is a hypothesis we measure in your pilot. (Humlum & Vestergaard, NBER WP 33777, 2025; Bick, Blandin & Deming, St. Louis Fed, 2025.)
- Problems caught earlier. Broken tracking or stopped delivery is flagged at the next check. Your platforms' own rules already catch some of this, so we count only what 1ads catches earlier, after someone approves the fix.
- Ad spend that is not earning its keep. We assume 0% in the conservative case and 0.5% of spend reallocated in the expected case (1.5% as an upside), from brand search that fails a holdout, segments with many refused COD parcels and weak placements, and only for the half of proposals we assume you accept. It is not guaranteed, so we always show the result without it.
What that means for businesses like yours
We will publish modelled results for typical businesses only after the first pilots have measured how many AI credits real teams use, because credits are part of the cost. Until then, the ROI calculator lets you enter your own usage and shows the conservative case first.
What our model already says, before we publish any figure: on our current assumptions, in the conservative case none of the typical businesses we modelled (a Romanian online shop, a Western-EU brand, agencies with 15 clients, a global brand, a micro-shop) gets its money back within 12 months, and a Romanian agency or a shop spending about €2k a month does not pay back even in the expected case. That is why we start with a pilot you can leave (below).
Not sure it pays off? Start with a 90-day pilot at a fixed price, and leave without penalty if the measured result falls below your break-even. Request a pilot
We are new. So you can leave if we measure that it does not work for you.
- 90 days at a fixed price: the plan's monthly list price times three, add-ons at list price, no onboarding fee (your plan's onboarding hours are included). 60 days only on Pro, Agency 15 and Agency, when your main channels are already live for writing.
- The fee stays fixed. Extra AI credits are switched off during the pilot by default (you can allow at most one credit pack a month), and the maximum total is printed in your Order Form.
- A checkpoint at day 30. If a platform has not yet approved our access and your main channels are not live, you choose: end the pilot (you pay only the first invoice) or extend it by up to 30 days at the monthly list price. If you do not choose within 5 business days, the pilot continues on its original dates.
- Cancel without penalty within 10 business days of receiving the measurement report (by day 76, or day 46 on a 60-day pilot) if the hours your team actually saved, at the hourly cost written in your Order Form, plus the monthly price of the tools you actually cancelled, fall below the break-even shown in your estimate. Hours are measured against a baseline we both sign before you start, with task counts from 1ads itself, after the time spent reviewing proposals. Ad improvements, incidents caught and COD savings are in the report but do not count: they cannot be proven in 90 days. Pilot fees are not refunded. The binding pilot terms are those written in your Order Form.
- What you get either way: a signed two-week baseline before onboarding and a two-week pilot log in weeks 9–10 (5–6 on a 60-day pilot), the list of tools you could cancel, one guided holdout where your volume allows (with its cost estimated in advance), a profit report with refunds and refused COD parcels (Shopify or WooCommerce stores), and a log of the incidents we flagged.
- SSO and full white-label are set up after the day-30 checkpoint, or after conversion on a 60-day pilot.
- Your maximum exposure is the fixed pilot fee (for example 1,794 lei for Starter + one 12-hour Guardian on the Romanian price list), plus at most one credit pack a month if you opt in, plus your own team's setup hours. Your Order Form prints the maximum total.
When 1ads is not worth paying for: we would rather tell you now
- Your ad spend is under about €2k a month. It will not pay back. On cash alone (not counting hours), a Romanian in-house shop needs a far larger ad budget before the fee pays for itself. Counting the marketer's hours, the fee can be covered at much lower spend, but only if the hours saved are real; that is what the pilot measures.
- You are a Romanian agency and want your money back within a year. At Romanian salaries our own model says it does not happen, even on Agency 15 with the Romanian price list. Start with a pilot, not a subscription.
- You use one channel, your tracking is clean and you are happy with Advantage+ or Performance Max. The native tools plus a general AI assistant are enough.
- You need rules that act on their own within minutes. Native rules and dedicated rule tools do that; with 1ads every change waits for a person.
- Your procurement requires SOC 2 or ISO 27001 today. We do not have them yet.
- Your shop runs on Gomag, MerchantPro or PrestaShop and you want profit or COD data. There is no connector yet.
- You want someone to run your ads for you. 1ads is software. Someone on your side still decides and creates.
One workspace for paid, organic and the numbers that matter
AI Chat
Reads and analyses anything you can see in the interface, and drafts any change the interface can make. Approving and applying stay with people. It always shows you the screen it used.
Performance Guardian
Checks every campaign against your targets every hour, 12 hours or day, and proposes fixes you approve.
True ROI
Profit on ad spend after COGS, shipping, fees, refunds and refused COD parcels, with a confidence grade from A to D.
Trend Radar
Spots rising topics in Romania and proposes on-brand posts or ads, behind a brand-safety gate.
Content & Approvals
Studio, calendar and approval chains from your team to your client.
White-label
Your logo, your domain, your client portal.
API & MCP
Connect your own tools and AI agents. No API key can approve or apply a change.
New company, closed access program. Here is what that means.
- No track record yet. No case studies and no public reviews. We will publish results only when we have measured them, and only with the customer's permission.
- No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification yet. See Security & Trust for what we do have.
- Channels arrive one by one. Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok each review apps like ours before granting full access. Before launch we publish a dated table of what works per network (read, draft, write live or pending); until then you may not have every channel on day one.
- Not in the first release: a social inbox, social listening and our own tracking pixel. Tools that specialise in these do them better.
- Trend Radar covers Romania only at launch. Other markets can be added on request.
- Approval first means slower reactions than tools whose rules act on their own.
- A single AI provider. The chat and analyses run on Anthropic's Claude models. If its availability, prices or processing locations change, so may ours.
- Two price lists. Companies established in Romania get a separate, lower price list in lei, with contracts and e-Factura invoices in lei. Everyone else uses the USD list; EU businesses outside Romania can be invoiced in EUR at the BNR rate on the invoice date. We review the lei list if the exchange rate moves by more than 3% or an AI provider raises its prices; plan prices in a signed Order Form stay fixed for its term, while add-on and credit-pack prices can change for future purchases on 30 days' notice.
- Prices and features will change before general availability. What you sign in your Order Form is what applies to you.
Built so that the AI cannot spend your money on its own
- Customer data is stored in the EU, on our own on-premises Kubernetes cluster in a data centre in Romania (not a public cloud). We run the cluster ourselves, under our FirstIT brand.
- To answer chat requests, the data excerpts needed are processed by Anthropic in the US under EU-approved transfer safeguards. There is no EU-only AI option yet.
- The AI can read, draft and propose. It has no permission to apply changes. A person with recent multi-factor authentication does that.
- Tokens for the platforms we connect directly (Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Microsoft) are encrypted in our vault and never sent to an AI model. Channels connected through data partners, and organic publishing through our publishing partner, are authorised with that partner (see Sub-processors).
- Each customer's data is kept separate and is never pooled with anyone else's.
Request, conversation, contract
- Tell us about your company in a short form (about 3 minutes).
- A person reviews it. We aim to reply within 5 business days, with a yes, a few questions or a place on the waitlist.
- A 30-minute call to check fit, channels and what to measure.
- Order Form and DPA. You sign; we invoice you directly. Bank transfer; e-Factura for Romanian companies.
- We set up your workspace, invite your admins and help you connect your accounts.
Questions we hear most
Why pay 1ads instead of using Meta's and Google's free automation?
Keep using them. Advantage+, Performance Max and AI Max are free, they use signals no outside tool can see, and 1ads does not bid instead of them. What they do not do is judge themselves: each platform optimises and reports on its own attribution, inside its own walls. 1ads sits above them. It joins ad data with your store and analytics, judges every channel on your targets and, where your store data allows, on profit after COGS, refunds and refused COD parcels, flags when tracking breaks or delivery stops, proposes moving budget between channels, and helps you test whether a channel really adds sales (for example with a brand-search holdout). If you advertise on one channel, your tracking is clean and you are happy with the results, you probably do not need us. Our own model says a shop spending about €2k a month on Meta alone does not pay back.
Does the AI change my campaigns on its own?
No. The AI can read, analyse, draft and propose. It has no permission to apply anything. A change runs only after an authorised person approves it. In the app, an approval needs multi-factor authentication within the last 15 minutes. From email or Slack, the approver confirms with a one-time code; approval links expire and work only once. During the closed access program there is no auto-approval at all, with no exceptions in any contract. Before an approved change runs, 1ads re-reads the live campaign; if something changed since the proposal, it goes back for approval. Hard limits, such as how much a budget may change in a day, apply even to approved changes. The trade-off is speed: at 3 a.m. a person has to approve, so tools with autonomous rules react faster.
How do you calculate ROI?
Two different things carry that name.
Your ads' return inside 1ads: we start from profit, not revenue. Profit on ad spend (POAS) is net revenue minus COGS, shipping, payment fees, refunds and refused COD parcels, divided by ad spend. We never add up conversions reported by different platforms. Each channel then gets an incrementality factor from tests and cited research, and every result shows a range and a confidence grade from A (a recent controlled test) to D (estimates only).
The value of paying for 1ads: the calculator adds what you can verify first (tools you cancel, then net hours saved × your loaded hourly cost), then problems caught earlier and a cautious range for ad efficiency, and subtracts the plan, add-ons, AI credits, the hours you spend setting it up and the cost of any holdout. It shows the net value and payback first, then value-to-cost, for the conservative and expected cases, with and without ad improvement.
Why closed access?
Three reasons. First, platform approvals: Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok review apps like ours before granting full access, so channels arrive progressively, and we would rather onboard you when your channels work. Second, we want to measure results with every customer (hours, tools cancelled, one guided test) instead of guessing them. Third, contracts and invoices are manual during the closed access program: an Order Form you sign, invoices paid by bank transfer. So a person reviews each request, usually with a short call, and we may say "not yet" if we are not a good fit for you.
Where is my data stored?
Your account and customer data are stored in the EU, on our own on-premises Kubernetes cluster in a data centre in Romania (not a public cloud). We run the cluster ourselves, under our FirstIT brand. To answer a chat request or run an analysis, the excerpts needed for that task are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, which processes them in the United States under EU-approved transfer safeguards (the mechanism is stated for each provider in the Sub-processors list). Images are generated by OpenAI, also in the United States, and transactional email is sent through Amazon SES (Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, EU region). Under their commercial terms, neither AI provider trains its models on this data. Until zero data retention is confirmed, Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days, except content flagged by its safety systems (kept up to 2 years) and where the law requires; OpenAI may keep abuse-monitoring logs for up to 30 days. Tokens for the platforms we connect directly are encrypted in our vault and never sent to an AI model; channels connected through data partners are authorised with that partner. Each customer's data is kept separate. The sub-processor list, with locations, is public, and we give 30 days' notice before adding one. An EU-only AI processing option is being evaluated; it is not available yet.
Do you have case studies?
Not yet. We are new, and we will not publish numbers we have not measured. In every pilot we measure with you: a signed two-week baseline before onboarding and a pilot log in weeks 9–10, the tools you cancel, one guided holdout where your volume allows, and a COD-adjusted profit report.
Which ad platforms work on day one?
Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft Ads are built for reading and writing; each becomes available to you as that platform approves our access. Amazon Ads, Pinterest, Snap, Reddit and X are read-only at first, through data partners. GA4, Adobe Analytics, Search Console, Shopify, WooCommerce and HubSpot connect for analytics and profit data. Before launch we publish a dated table per network showing what is live (read, draft, write) and what is pending, including platform limits such as Meta's maximum of 4 budget changes per ad set per hour.
Does 1ads replace my agency or media buyer?
No. It gives them, or you, better-founded decisions and less busywork. Someone still decides what to approve and makes the creative.
See if 1ads pays off for you, before you talk to us
The calculator takes two minutes and shows the conservative case first. If it is below 1x, ask for a pilot.