How much does a playable ad cost?

The options side by side

There’s no rate card for playables. These are the published figures we could find for each way of getting one; where a company doesn’t publish a price, the table says so instead of guessing.

Studio or agency

Typical cost$3,000–5,000 per playable (AppAgent); one small studio lists $300 for 2D, $500 for 3D; many quote per project

Turnaround2–4 weeks (AppAgent); 2–4 days at that small studio

Fits whenYou want a team to own the concept and the production

Freelancer

Typical costPer gig or quote; one agency’s Fiverr gig: €1,171, contact first

Turnaround10 days on that gig

Fits whenA one-off playable with a clear brief

In-house developer

Typical costA developer’s salary; AppAgent reports 60–80% lower cost than outsourcing after setup

Turnaround“Days vs. weeks” once set up (AppAgent)

Fits whenYou make 5 or more playables a month (AppAgent’s threshold)

Template tools

Typical cost$29.99–$349.99 a month (Playable Ads Maker), €59–€599 a month (PlayableMaker); Playable Factory Ready and Playturbo after a demo

TurnaroundMinutes per playable from a template, by the vendors’ own figures

Fits whenSimple formats from art or video you already have

AI playable makers

Typical costPlayablesAI from a one-time €25, then €299–€2,990 a month; Layer from $10 a month; Playbaker Pro from $29 a month billed yearly

TurnaroundAbout 10 minutes for a simple playable to 10 hours for a complex one (PlayablesAI); 14–97 minutes for our recorded builds

Fits whenNew game-like concepts often, without a developer

Network tools

Typical costUnity Playworks free for Unity Ads only, $15K a month for every network; AppLovin’s AI-generated interactives free

TurnaroundNot published

Fits whenYou have a Unity project, or most of your spend is on one network

What drives the cost

Whoever makes it, the same things decide how much work a playable is:

• Variants. One playable rarely runs alone: you test versions with a different hook, difficulty or end card. Each one is another build or another revision round on the quote.
• Revisions. A studio prices in rounds of feedback. With a tool, a change costs your own time or your plan’s credits.
• 2D or 3D. 3D needs models, rigs and animation, and more care to stay small. The one studio we found with public prices charges $300 for a 2D playable and $500 for 3D, and quotes 2 days against 4.
• Art. Reusing the game’s own sprites is cheaper than drawing new ones. Original art and animation is part of a custom playable’s price.
• Network packaging. Each network wants its own file and store call. In our export, Meta allows 2 MB where the others allow 5 MB, and 4 of the 9 networks we export to take a ZIP with a fixed layout instead of a single HTML file. Some tools price by it: PlayableMaker’s plans cap the number of ad networks per export below Pro.
• QA. Every build has to be played on real screen sizes, in portrait and landscape, and pass each network’s rules. That’s testing time on every variant, and a file a network rejects has to be fixed and uploaded again.

Studios and agencies

A studio takes your brief and delivers a finished playable, often with the concept and the art. It’s the most expensive route per playable and the least work for you.

• AppAgent’s 2025 review of playable ads: “External playable production typically costs $3,000-$5,000 per creative with 2-4 week turnaround times.”
• Unity, in a 2022 blog post: outsourcing costs “anything from $3K to $10K per playable, depending on location.”
• Arc Studio publishes a lower price: $300 per 2D playable in 2 days, $500 per 3D playable in 4 days, with scenario, original art and builds for your ad networks included.
• Playable Factory, which designs and codes custom playables, doesn’t publish prices; you start with a demo request.

Ask what a quote includes: the number of variants, revision rounds, which networks it’s packaged for, and who owns the source.

Freelancers

Freelance marketplaces such as Fiverr list playable ad gigs from individual developers and small agencies. One agency’s playable ad gig on Fiverr showed €1,171 for one playable with 10-day delivery when we checked, and asks you to get in touch first because “the price and delivery time of creating the ad will vary”. We couldn’t load enough listings to give a typical range. Check which networks the seller will package for, and whether a variant counts as a new order.

An in-house developer

If you already have an HTML5 or Unity developer, the cost is their time on every concept and every variant, plus packaging and testing for each network (the steps by hand). AppAgent’s review says moving production in-house brings a “cost reduction of 60-80% after initial setup investment” and “rapid iteration capability (days vs. weeks)”, and that internal teams pay off “for companies producing 5+ playables monthly”.

Template and no-code tools

You pick a ready-made format and put your art or video in it. These are the cheapest self-serve route, and the playable is the template’s mechanic, not your game’s.

• Playable Ads Maker: Solo $29.99, Studio $99.99 and Agency $349.99 a month, billed monthly. Solo has 10 exports a month; a free account gets 2 exports in its first 14 days.
• PlayableMaker, billed monthly: Essential €59 (8 exports), Starter €159 (60 exports) and Pro €599 (unlimited), with a 30-day free trial of 2 exports. It counts in exports, and below Pro each export covers a limited number of ad networks.
• Playable Factory Ready (40+ formats, “as little as 5–20 minutes” per playable) and Playturbo don’t list prices on their pages: Playable Factory asks for a demo request and Playturbo offers a consultation.

AI playable makers

AI tools build a playable from a prompt, a brief or a store link, and you change it by asking. Most price in credits, and a credit means something different in each product, so compare what one playable costs, not the credit counts.

• PlayablesAI: Starter is a one-time €25 for 200 credits; Pro €299, Business €799 and Growth €2,990 a month for 1,000, 2,500 and 9,000 credits. Its own examples: a simple playable takes about 50 to 100 credits and 10 minutes, a complex one about 1,000 to 1,500 credits and 10 hours.
• Layer: subscriptions “begin at $10/month for 300 Creative Units”, and playable creation is included in the plan, using units. It doesn’t publish how many a playable takes.
• PlayableMaker’s plans include 1, 7 or 40 AI “Vibe Code Iterations” a month, on top of its templates.
• Playbaker, below.

Ad networks’ own tools

• Unity Playworks (formerly Luna) builds playables from your Unity project, through a plugin build target. Its free plan has unlimited exports but downloads to the Unity Ads network only; the plan with every supported network, Insights and Creative Testing is listed at “$15K monthly”. Playbaker vs Unity Playworks compares the two.
• AppLovin says its AI-generated interactives “automatically appear in your account free of charge”, and AppLovin Creative Studio lets you build custom interactives with its built-in tools. The interactive follows the video in AppLovin’s ad.

Free from the network is a good deal when most of your spend is there; you’ll still need files for every other network.

What it costs in Playbaker

Playbaker charges credits for the work its agents do: planning, art, code and play-testing. Exporting a file for a network uses none. A first build at Low quality uses about 10 credits, and an edit you ask for in chat usually 2 to 4. Medium and High quality use more.

• Free: 10 credits a month, about one first build at Low quality. Build, play and edit in the studio; no export.
• Pro: from $29 a month billed yearly, or $35 billed monthly, for 50 credits, with export to every network. At that tier a 10-credit first build comes to about $6 to $7 of credits.
• Bigger tiers and Business are on the pricing page. Paid plans are opening soon; choosing one now joins the waitlist at that price.

These are the builds in our showcase whose project record we kept. They ran from 12 to 126 credits, follow-up edits included: Medium and High quality, 3D and each round of changes add credits.

What the price doesn’t include: a template library or drag-and-drop editor, ad performance analytics, or your game’s own code (the playable is a rebuild of your mechanic). Making a playable ad without coding walks through a build.

What results to expect

The largest public data set we found is Liftoff’s 2025 Mobile Ad Creative Index, based on over 4.7 trillion impressions, 263 billion clicks and 1.1 billion installs between January 2023 and May 2025. In Liftoff’s announcement, playables’ impression-to-install rates “were 8 times that of non-playable formats for top spenders and 16 times that of non-playable formats for other game advertisers”, and its summary adds that top-spending apps put over 35% more of their spend into playables than other apps.

Read those as averages across Liftoff’s campaigns, not a forecast for one playable: they compare formats, not the same concept made two ways, and they’re for games. Your own test against your current video is the number that counts, which is why variants belong in the budget.

Questions

More: playable ad tools compared, playable ad best practices and what a playable ad is.