Three tools, three category labels that sound interchangeable, and a price range that spans roughly 86x from bottom to top. That is the actual story of creative automation pricing in 2026, and it is mostly hidden because two of these three vendors do not publish a number.
Everything below was checked against the vendors on 5 September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, this article says so instead of estimating one.
What each one costs
| Platform | Entry price | Billing model | Published? |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Brief (formerly Creatopy) | $29/mo Pro, $79/mo Ultra | Annual billing; $49/seat/mo for Team | Yes |
| Hunch | ~EUR 2,500/mo | Enterprise contract | Only via its own comparison content |
| Smartly | Not published | Custom Order Form, spend-based fees possible | No |
| AdRiseLab | $39/mo Starter | Month to month, 100 credits | Yes |
The Brief, formerly Creatopy
The rebrand matters if you are searching. As of 5 September 2026, creatopy.com/pricing issues a 301 to thebrief.ai/pricing, so a lot of the comparison content still circulating uses a name the company has moved on from.
Published plans are Pro at $29/month and Ultra at $79/month, both billed annually ($348 and $948 respectively). Team is $49 per seat per month. Enterprise is quote-only with monthly, quarterly or annual usage-based terms. There is a 7-day trial on all of it.
The pitch on the pricing page is worth quoting because it is a deliberate positioning choice: no credits, no counters, just plans. If you have ever burned an afternoon working out whether 100 credits is a lot, you will understand why they put that in 40-point type.
Hunch
Hunch does not have a self-serve price list. The figure that circulates, roughly EUR 2,500 per month as a starting point, comes from Hunch published comparison content rather than a rate card. Enterprise scope and contract terms move it from there.
That number tells you who Hunch is for more clearly than any feature list. At EUR 2,500 a month you are a brand with a product feed large enough that automated creative assembly saves more than it costs. Below that, the maths does not work.
Smartly
Smartly does not publish pricing, and it does not appear to want to. On 5 September 2026, smartly.io/pricing returned a 404 rather than a contact form.
What is knowable comes from the contract structure: custom Order Forms, standard terms that permit spend-based fees, and a monthly minimum. Spend-based means your cost scales with media budget, which is the normal enterprise arrangement and also the reason a public number would be meaningless.
The comparison nobody makes
These three get grouped together because they all describe themselves with some combination of creative, automation and scale. The grouping falls apart the moment you look at what triggers a purchase.
- The Brief replaces a designer bottleneck. You buy it when creative production is slow. - Hunch replaces manual assembly against a product feed. You buy it when your catalogue is too large to build ads for by hand. - Smartly replaces a buying and reporting stack across platforms. You buy it when Meta is one of four channels and someone needs a single console.
A team that needs one of these almost never needs the other two. The overlap is in the marketing copy, not the workflow.
The number that actually decides it
Price per month is the wrong unit for this category. The useful unit is cost per usable creative per week, and it depends on a number most vendors do not put on the pricing page: how fast your creative goes stale.
Creative lifespan varies more by vertical than most pricing differences do. Mobile apps burn a creative in about 5 days. Fashion runs about 8. Real estate holds for 15, and commercial listings stretch to 22. A tool that costs $79/month and produces four usable variants a week is expensive for a real estate agent and cheap for a hypercasual game studio.
Work out how many fresh creatives a month your vertical actually consumes before you compare monthly fees. Our Meta ads benchmarks by industry list the modeled creative lifespan per vertical, which is the input this calculation needs and which none of the three pricing pages provide.
Where AdRiseLab sits
For completeness, since this is our site: AdRiseLab is $39/month for Starter with 100 credits, $99 for Pro and $249 for Scale, billed month to month. It is Meta-only, which is a genuine limitation if you run Google as well, and a genuine advantage if you do not.
That puts it next to The Brief on price and nowhere near Hunch or Smartly, which is the honest read. If you are weighing the specific trade-offs, we keep side-by-side pages for AdRiseLab vs Creatopy, AdRiseLab vs Smartly and AdRiseLab vs Hunch, and the current plans are on pricing.
Before you budget
Pricing pages go stale faster than anything else on a vendor site, and comparison articles go stale faster still. This one carries a date at the top for that reason. If you are reading it more than a quarter after 5 September 2026, treat every figure here as a starting point and check the vendor.