How a vendor charges you determines what they optimise for. It is worth understanding before you sign, because the pricing model is much harder to change later than the technology is.
Revenue share
The vendor takes a percentage of your programmatic revenue, commonly somewhere in the 10–30% range. The appeal is obvious: no fixed cost, and the vendor is paid only when you earn.
The problems appear later. The cost is unbounded — triple your revenue and you triple the fee, for a platform that costs the vendor barely more to run. And the incentive is volume of revenue, which is not the same as your long-term interest: more ads, more refresh and more aggressive placements all raise revenue share in the short run while degrading your site.
There is also a transparency issue. If the vendor reports the revenue and calculates its own cut, you are trusting a number you cannot independently verify.
Flat fee, metered on impressions
You pay a fixed monthly amount for a volume tier. The vendor's cost tracks its actual cost driver — requests served — and your yield improvements are entirely yours.
The trade-off is that you pay in a bad month too. For a site earning very little, a flat fee can exceed a revenue share. For a site earning meaningfully, it is almost always cheaper, and the gap widens every time you improve.
It also aligns incentives properly. A vendor paid per impression has no reason to push you toward user-hostile ad density.
Working out your crossover
The arithmetic is simple and worth doing before any sales call.
Revenue share cost = monthly programmatic revenue x share %
Flat fee cost = tier price for your monthly impression volume
Example: 8,000,000 impressions/month at EUR 1.10 CPM
Monthly revenue = 8,000,000 / 1,000 x 1.10 = EUR 8,800
Revenue share at 15% = EUR 1,320 / month
Flat fee (10M tier) = EUR 199 / month
Crossover at 15% share: flat fee wins above roughly
EUR 1,327 of monthly revenue.Run it with your own numbers. The point is not the specific figures but that the crossover usually sits far lower than publishers expect, and that revenue share gets relatively worse every month you succeed.
Hybrid and hidden models
- Flat fee plus revenue share — sometimes framed as a discount on the fee. Check the total, not the headline.
- Free wrapper, vendor SSP seats — the wrapper costs nothing because the vendor takes a margin inside the demand path. This can be fine, but you should know the margin, and you no longer have a direct payment relationship with buyers.
- Free with mandatory demand — you must run the vendor's demand alongside your own. Ask what happens if their demand underperforms.
- Minimum commitments — a percentage with an annual floor is a flat fee wearing a costume.
The question that clarifies most vendor conversations: "if my CPMs double next year, does what I pay you change?" A flat-fee vendor says no. Anyone who says yes is taking a share of work you did.
What ssm.codes charges
A flat monthly fee metered on ad impressions, never a share of revenue. Free up to 1 million impressions a month, then €199 for up to 10 million, €749 for up to 50 million, and custom above that, with roughly 15% off for annual billing. Your yield improvements stay yours, and you keep your own Ad Manager network and SSP contracts.
Related questions
Is revenue share ever better than a flat fee?
For very small sites, yes — a percentage of a tiny revenue base can be less than any fixed fee, and it carries no risk in a bad month. The crossover typically arrives quickly. Once you are earning consistently, revenue share costs more and keeps growing with success you paid for.
What is a typical header bidding revenue share?
Commonly between 10% and 30% of programmatic revenue, varying with how much the vendor also handles commercially. Watch for shares applied to gross rather than net, minimum annual commitments, and margins taken inside the demand path that do not appear as a share at all.
Why do some header bidding platforms cost nothing?
Usually because they earn inside the demand path instead — running your inventory through their own SSP seats and taking a margin before you see the revenue. That is not automatically bad, but it is not free, and it means you cannot see what your inventory actually cleared at. Ask for the margin explicitly.
Do I keep my own SSP contracts on a flat fee platform?
On a well-designed one, yes — your bidder relationships stay yours and each SSP pays you directly. This matters because it is what makes the vendor replaceable: if you can point your existing contracts at a different wrapper, you have leverage. Verify this before signing, whatever the pricing model.
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