Pricing

Because a flat fee gets paid whether your grant works or not.

The standard arrangement in this market is a flat setup fee + fixed retainer: the same amount leaves your account every month whether your campaigns spend $10,000 or $500. The agency’s income is disconnected from your results.

Ours is not. If we let your spend slide, our fee slides with it. If we get more of the grant working, we earn more — but only because you got more. It is the only structure we have found that puts an agency and a nonprofit on the same side of the table, and it is why we have never needed a long contract to keep clients.

Also, the average grant utilization in the program is only $500 per month. Using the full grant is challenging, and this pricing model aligns your goals with our goals.

Most agencies will not put this in writing. We will. Here is the whole fee schedule:

• $2,000 of monthly Ad Grants spend  →  $350
• $3,000  →  $350 (minimum fee)
• $5,000  →  $350
• $7,000  →  $490
• $9,000  →  $630
• $10,000, the full grant  →  $700 (maximum fee)

In short: below $5,000 of monthly spend you pay the $350 minimum. Above it, you pay 7% and nothing more. For context, our clients average around $9,000 of the $10,000 monthly grant, against a program-wide average where most accounts use a fraction of what they are given.

Because the work does not shrink as fast as the spend does.

An account that spends $2,000 still needs the same setup, compliance monitoring, the same monthly review, the same conversion tracking, and the same senior manager on call as one that spends $10,000. The minimum covers that floor.

In practice, it stops mattering quickly — most accounts pass $7,000 in monthly spend within the first few months, and from then on you are paying a percentage, not a minimum.

If the free audit shows we cannot realistically move your account past that floor (due to extremely low search volume for relevant keywords, high competition in your vertical, etc.), we will tell you so and point you to a better fit — we would rather lose the sale than take a minimum for work that will not pay you back.

Because three months is the shortest honest window in which you can judge us.

• Month one is setup: account structure, keywords, ad copy, conversion tracking, compliance.
• Month two is when the new structure starts collecting enough data to optimise against.
• Month three is the first month whose numbers reflect our work rather than our setup.

Ad Grants campaigns use automated bidding algorithms that take time and data to work properly. Campaign performance improves over time. After 3 months, we will clearly see if it makes sense to continue our engagement or not. If it makes sense, we then run month to month — no notice period, no renewal trap.

Any agency promising a meaningful result faster than that is describing a launch, not a result.

Yes, there is. If you only want us to set up your campaigns, help you with an application issue, account suspension, or similar, we will discuss the scope of work, give you a workload estimate, and apply an hourly rate. Our hourly rate for Ad Grants management is $80. Hourly rates for other services are clearly listed on this page.

Yes. All our clients are welcome to participate in our referral program – https://www.abovexdigital.com/partnerships/.

For each referred organization, we lower your management fee by 14%. That means that by referring one organization to us, your Ad Grants management fee drops from 7% to 6%. You can refer multiple organizations and drop your fee further.

No, and neither can any other agency.

The Ad Grant is in-kind advertising credit from Google. It can buy clicks and nothing else — it cannot be withdrawn, transferred, or used to pay for services. Management fees are paid from your own budget.

This is worth checking with anyone you talk to: if an agency is vague about where its fee comes from, that is a warning sign.

Every Ad Grants application we have filed since 2014 has been approved — across more than 350 nonprofit organizations, that is a 100% approval rate.

The application assistance itself is free. You pay nothing until the account is live and spending.

None.

• Account audit — free
• Eligibility check and Google for Nonprofits setup — free
• Ad Grants application — free
• Account build, campaign creation, conversion tracking — included
• Reactivating a suspended account — included
• Setup fee — none
• Credit card on file — not required

The monthly management fee is the entire cost of the Ad Grants management service.

Everything the grant needs, with no cap on account size and no per-campaign charges:

• Application, or reactivation if your account was suspended
• Campaign strategy, keyword research and ad copy
• Full account build and ongoing restructuring
• Basic conversion tracking and Google Analytics 4 setup
• Continuous optimization — search terms, bidding, budget allocation, testing & more
• Compliance monitoring against every Ad Grants requirement
• A live Google Data Studio dashboard, available to you 24/7
• A written monthly analysis of campaign performance, changes and next steps
• Ad-hoc calls and continuous support by a dedicated senior manager who knows your cause — not a shared support queue

Anything outside the grant itself, so you always know what you are buying:

• Microsoft Ads Grants management  →  $300 per month
• Google Ad Grants training, with a Google Certified Trainer  →  $100 per hour
• Goodstack verification and Google for Nonprofits consulting  →  $100 per hour
• Commercial Google Ads, Bing, paid social, advanced analytics, SEO and CRO  →  $80 per hour
• Website development  →  $100 per hour
• Content creation  →  $60 per hour
• Graphics and design  →  $60 per hour

We quote before we start. Nothing appears on an invoice you did not approve.

Sometimes we are, and for some organizations those agencies are the right answer. It is worth being clear about the difference.

At the low end of this market, you are buying a productized service: a templated account build, generic ad copy created via AI, a shared support queue, a standard report. That is a legitimate product, and if your budget is low and you want to start using Ad Grants, it may serve you well.

What you are paying for here is a dedicated senior manager who knows your cause, an account with no size cap, live reporting, and a monthly read written by the person who actually made the changes, years of experience, contacts at Google / Goodstack, step-by-step assistance with the application, and any issue you might have etc. We summarize our main competitive advantages here – https://www.abovexdigital.com/what-makes-us-stand-out/.

If your Ad Grant is a serious acquisition channel rather than a box to tick, that difference shows up in how much of the $10,000 ends up working. Templated setups without experienced human management rarely manage to use the grant fully. And there is the structural difference: a $250 flat fee is $250 whether your account spends $10,000 or $800. Ours is not.

It stays yours. It always was.

The Google Ads account is registered to your organization, we work inside it via manager access, and you keep every campaign, keyword, conversion action, and historical data point when we part ways. We hand over cleanly and, if you want, we will spend an hour walking your team through how to keep it running and staying compliant.

Yes. We are a Google Ad Grants Certified Professional Agency working globally, and we run accounts in English, Spanish, German, Italian, Czech, and Slovak.

Ad Grants is available in more than 50 countries, and the compliance rules are the same everywhere — what changes is the language, the search behavior, and the local competition, which is exactly what campaign strategy is for.

We accept payments in USD and EUR.

We support credit card payments (initiated by you, not on our file), ACH transfers, wire transfers, and check payments.

Yes, and we will not talk you out of it.

Training with our Google Trainer for Nonprofits is $100 per hour. The format, length, and content are set with you. Some organizations do one session on compliance, others build a full internal capability over several weeks.

The free account audit stands either way. Whether you hand us the account afterwards or take the report and run it yourselves is entirely your call.