Mobile Game Marketing Agency Pricing in 2026

Mobile game UA and marketing agencies charge for running your campaigns in four main ways: a percentage of your monthly ad spend, a fixed monthly retainer, a smaller retainer plus a performance bonus, or a price per install or action. Pricing guides published this year by two UA agencies put the percentage at 5–15% or 10–20% of spend, and retainers at $3,000–$25,000 a month, with growth retainers for game studios at $8,000–$30,000 or more. One of them puts the usual minimum ad budget at $10,000–$30,000 a month. None of the three guides says what its own agency charges.

Our prices are on our pricing page. SuperMedia, the managed UA service powered by the SuperScale Stack, charges an 8% management fee on managed spend. If you would rather your own team ran UA on our software, a SuperScale Stack pilot is €7k per game per month: one game, one team, 12-month agreement. You choose one or the other, and SuperMedia needs no stack license.

The four pricing models

Percentage of ad spend

The agency takes a share of the media it runs each month: 5–15% in one guide and 10–20% in the other two. The first adds that the rate usually falls as the budget grows. Because the fee moves with spend, a bigger budget is covered without a new contract. It also grows with spend whether or not the extra spend pays back, which is true of any percentage fee, ours included.

Some agencies bill the percentage as its own line on the invoice. Others build it into the price of the media as a markup, so the invoice shows one number and the delivered cost of the media is harder to read.

Monthly retainer

The agency charges a fixed fee each month, sized to the scope: channels, markets, creative volume and reporting. Two of the guides call it the most common structure, and they put UA management retainers at $3,000–$25,000 a month and growth retainers for game studios at $8,000–$30,000 or more. A retainer is predictable, and it shrinks as a share of spend when the budget grows. $10,000 is 20% of a $50,000 month and 2% of a $500,000 one. It changes only when the scope is renegotiated, so a budget that doubles mid-quarter can outgrow the work the retainer pays for.

Base retainer plus performance bonus

A hybrid pairs a smaller retainer, $3,000–$8,000 a month in two of the guides, with a bonus when campaigns beat an agreed ROAS, CPA or install target. The same two guides call it the dominant structure for sophisticated engagements in 2026. Agree the target, the attribution source and the measurement window in writing before the first campaign runs, or the bonus turns into a monthly argument about whose numbers count.

Price per install or action

You pay for each install or in-app action the agency delivers. All three guides call this rare in full-service mobile UA, and one says attribution in mobile games is too complex to run pay-only-for-results pricing responsibly. A price per install also pays the seller for cheap installs, whether or not those installs ever pay back.

What the fee comes to at $50,000, $200,000 and $500,000 a month

These are the budgets the guides use in their own worked examples.

SuperMedia's 8% sits inside the lower range and below the higher one.

A retainer does not move with spend. At the published $3,000–$25,000 a month, it comes to 6–50% of a $50,000 budget and 0.6–5% of a $500,000 one. Before comparing quotes, convert each one to a monthly amount at the spend you plan, and to a percentage of that spend.

What you pay besides the fee

A UA budget has four lines when an agency runs it:

• Media. The ad spend itself, paid to the networks. At $1.71 per install, the 2025 US gaming average in Adjust's Gaming App Insights report, 100,000 installs is $171,000 of media. Our CPI benchmarks have the regional figures, and the costs section of our marketing strategy guide shows how to size the media line.
• The agency fee. One of the four models above.
• Creative production. Some agencies include it and others bill it separately. One guide puts separate creative at $2,000–$5,000 a month for static packages and $10,000–$20,000 or more for regular video and UGC-style ads.
• Tools. A mobile measurement partner (MMP) for attribution, plus the analytics and data warehouse your reporting runs on.

Agencies also set a floor under the media line. One guide puts the minimum most specialist UA agencies require at $10,000–$30,000 a month in ad spend, and another puts common thresholds around $25,000. Both say a small budget buys too few installs for optimization to have anything to work with.

What SuperScale charges

License the SuperScale Stack for your own team, or hand your UA to SuperMedia and our team runs it on the same stack.

Managed · SuperMedia

SuperMedia is the AI-native alternative to the UA agency. You bring budget, targets, and a tracking link — we grow your spend and improve your profit across 35+ networks under one IO. Agencies add headcount to scale; we add software.

IO stands for insertion order, the contract a media buy runs on. Your spend runs through SuperScale's own network agreements — one IO, 35+ networks. The 8% management fee is charged on the UA spend we manage and billed as its own line next to the media, on one invoice. SuperMedia is powered by the SuperScale Stack and needs no stack license. You pay the 8%, not a license plus the 8%. Onboarding is a tracking link, not an integration project.

What the 8% covers:

• Network expansion & sourcing
• Legal, procurement & IO handling
• Campaign setup & UA management
• Predictive LTV & ROAS modelling
• Creative-level performance analysis
• Optimisation & scaling
• Unified reporting
• Ongoing relationship management

Creative production is billed separately.

Licensed · SuperScale Stack

The SuperScale Stack is the software SuperMedia runs on, for your own team to operate: the SuperVYZR app, SuperAI agents and SuperPlatform data, licensed as one system and deployed in your own BigQuery. You own the data. A pilot is €7k per game per month: one game, one team, 12-month agreement. Multi-title publishers license annually, priced per portfolio.

The price is per game because each game is its own data ecosystem, so you pay for the games you run on the SuperScale Stack and nothing for the rest.

How to compare two quotes

Ask every agency the same four questions and put the answers in the same units:

1. What is the fee as a number, and what is it charged on? Media spend, managed spend and revenue produce different bills at the same percentage. Convert the answer to a monthly amount at the spend you plan.
2. What is billed outside the fee? Creative production, tools, setup and per-network charges can each add a line. Ask for the list in writing.
3. Who holds the network contracts and the data? If the agency buys on its own agreements, ask what happens to your campaigns and your data when the contract ends.
4. How is performance measured? Where a bonus depends on results, agree the attribution source, the target and the window first. Treat guaranteed install volumes, or CPIs quoted before anyone has seen your data, with suspicion.

Agency, in-house or licensed

An agency is one of three ways to run paid UA, and each is paid for differently.

An in-house team is a fixed cost: salaries, employer overhead, tools and management time, carried through slow quarters too. Against a percentage fee, the break-even is simple to work out. An 8% fee on $200,000 a month is $192,000 a year, and on $500,000 a month it is $480,000. Set your own fully loaded cost for the people you would hire against those figures. Headcount also caps how many networks you can run, and publishers commonly stall at the handful they can operationally manage.

Licensing the SuperScale Stack puts the same software in your team's hands for a price per game, covered above. Your team operates it, on your own network agreements.

Many publishers land on a hybrid: a lean in-house team owning strategy and the core Meta and Google channels, with SuperMedia running the expansion layer across 35+ networks. The side-by-sides are at SuperScale vs. a traditional UA agency and SuperScale vs. building an in-house UA team.

Judge the fee by what the spend returns

Whether a fee was worth paying depends on what the media it managed returned. On one game we took over, UA ROI went from −39% to +11%, worth $1.37M in extra profit after all fees. On another, a 2024 engagement, ROAS went from 50% to 153% and CPI fell 78%, from $2.80 to $0.60, and the game reached breakeven in four months. The write-ups are in our case studies.

To run the same test on your own numbers, the ROI calculator estimates the profitable revenue left on the networks you don't run today, valued at your target Day-360 ROAS and net of the 8% management fee.

Our prices are on the pricing page. If they work for your budget, talk to us.