Best Ad Spy Tools for Ecommerce in 2026
Compare ad spy tools on what they actually cost. Nine tools with prices read off each vendor's own page, and the four that would not show one.
Ad spy tools run from $10 to $459 a month, and four of the best known will not show you a price at all.
Every figure in this article was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 12 September 2026. None of it is copied from another comparison post, which matters more than it sounds: when we checked the prices that other listicles quote for BigSpy, PiPiADS, AdSpy and Anstrex, we could not find those numbers on any of those four vendors' sites today.
| Tool | Entry price | Free trial | Price verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| AdSpyder | $10/mo | No, 14-day money back | Yes |
| Minea | $49/mo | No, free registration | Yes |
| Trendtrack | $49/mo | Yes | Yes |
| Foreplay | $59/mo | Yes, 7 days | Yes |
| PowerAdSpy | $69/mo | Paid, $1 for 3 days | Yes |
| BigSpy | Not shown | Free tier advertised | No |
| PiPiADS | Not shown | Not shown | No |
| AdSpy | No pricing page | Not shown | No |
| Anstrex | No pricing page | Not shown | No |
Top prices, for the same tools: AdSpyder $99, Minea $199, Trendtrack $149, Foreplay $459, PowerAdSpy $399.
Why four of them have no price here
This is not an oversight and it is worth explaining, because it is the single most useful thing in this article.
Every ad spy listicle quotes a starting price for every tool it covers. We tried to confirm each one at the source. BigSpy's pricing page returns a normal page title and then paints nothing: in a real signed-out browser the body is fifty-eight characters of shell. PiPiADS does the same. AdSpy has no pricing route at all, and neither /pricing nor /plans resolves. Anstrex's /pricing is a 404.
So any article showing you a number for those four is showing you a number it did not read today. It may be right. It may be two years old. You cannot tell from the page, and neither could we, so we left the cell empty rather than fill it with something that looks authoritative.
Check what any brand is running before you pay for a tool
The nine tools
AdSpyder, from $10 a month
The cheapest entry point here by a distance. Four tiers: Spy at $10 for up to 1,000 ads, Spy plus Analytics and Generation at $20 for 5,000, All-in-One at $30 with no search cap, and All-in-One plus Brand Protection at $99. Annual billing saves two months. There is no free trial, only a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Minea, from $49 a month
Three tiers: Starter $49, Premium $99, Business $199, each about 20% cheaper paid quarterly. The tier differences are mostly AI credits, 10 analyses a month on Starter against unlimited on Business. No formal free trial; you register to look around.
Trendtrack, from $49 a month
Starter $49, Pro $89, Business $149, with 30% off annual and 15% off quarterly. The limit that actually separates the tiers is BrandTracker: 2 brands on Starter, 30 on Pro, unlimited on Business. Business includes 3 users and charges $29 a seat after that.
Foreplay, from $59 a month
The most seat-oriented pricing in the group, which tells you who it is built for, and what those seats do and do not buy an agency is the longer version of that question. Basic $59 with one seat, Workflow $175 with five, Agency $459 with ten, each extra seat $20. Spyder brand limits go 15 then 50, and become unlimited on annual billing. Seven-day free trial on every paid tier.
PowerAdSpy, from $69 a month
Four tiers from $69 to $399, separated by how many brands you can track: 1, 5, 10, 30. Annual discounts are steep, 58% to 70%. The trial is paid rather than free, $1 for three days on Basic and $7 on the tiers above, and it rolls into the full rate on day three unless cancelled.
BigSpy, PiPiADS, AdSpy and Anstrex
All four are widely recommended and all four declined to show us a price. BigSpy advertises a free tier on its marketing pages. PiPiADS is the most frequently cited TikTok-specific option and ranks first organically for "tiktok ad spy". AdSpy is one of the oldest names in the category. Anstrex is usually recommended for native and push rather than social.
We are not ranking tools we cannot price against tools we can, so they sit here without a position rather than padding a table.
What none of these tools show you
Almost every tool in this category reports engagement proxies: likes, comments, how long an ad has been running. Those are real signals, but they are inferences about spend, not spend. The same gap hides entire stores, the ones selling quietly with too few ads to register. Three views make the difference concrete.
Hooks, ranked by how long they have survived
This is RYZE's opening lines: 5,115 hooks, 961 of them still running, sorted by how long each has stayed live. The top one, about artificial sweeteners and gut bacteria, has been running 786 days with all three of its ads still active. Two years is not a test. It is a hook the brand has been unable to beat.
Two things fall out of that screen that a creative swipe file would not tell you. Survival is visible, so you can separate what a brand tried from what a brand kept. And three of the top four hooks are in Spanish, which means RYZE's longest-running creative is not the English-language work anyone browsing its ads would have looked at first.
Find the hooks already surviving in your niche
Landing pages, ranked by the ads pointing at them
Same brand, 44 tracked landing pages. The ranking is by how many ads point at each one, and the counts are blunt: the matcha product page at #1 has had 738 ads behind it, the ritual set 586, the hot cocoa page 531. The sixth page shows 300 of 301 ads still active, which is a page currently being pushed rather than one that was pushed once.
A tool that indexes ads shows you creative. This shows you where the money lands, which is the question you were actually asking.
Pull any competitor's landing pages, ranked by the ads behind them
Spend is published, but only in Europe
EU and UK disclosure rules require advertisers to publish spend and reach for ads served in those markets. For a brand selling into Europe that number is published rather than modelled. Feel Reformed, a UK collagen coffee brand, shows €4.3M of EU spend beside 759 active ads.
Now the same field on RYZE, a US brand earning roughly three times as much a month: €3k, against 13,871 active ads.
RYZE is not spending less. RYZE is spending almost entirely in a market where nobody has to publish the figure. Read those two cards the wrong way round and you would conclude that a $9M-a-month advertiser barely advertises. This is the most common mistake made with disclosed-spend data, and no amount of tool budget protects you from it.
Rank movement, which takes months of recording to be able to show
This is the panel no competitor can copy, and the reason is mundane rather than clever.
On the left, 29 of RYZE's ads have gained six or more rank positions. One went from #24 to #9 while it had been live 47 days. Another climbed #20 to #14 across 162 days. On the right, 11 ads are evergreen, live more than 60 days and still inside the top 30, including one holding #2 after 99 days.
Every ad spy tool on the market can show you what is running now. A snapshot can be copied by anyone who builds the same scraper. Movement cannot, because producing it requires someone to have been recording rank daily for months before you thought to ask the question. There is no way to backfill it.
"This ad went from #24 to #9 in seven weeks" is a different claim from "this ad is running", and it is the one that tells you what a brand is currently betting on.
Track a competitor and watch the movement accumulate
Rank is worldwide, spend is only the European slice. Rank badges are computed across everything a brand runs in every market, while the euro figure covers only what Europe forces into the open. So the landing page ranked #1 above is a worldwide winner even though the euro figure beside that brand is small. Rank answers "is this working". Spend answers "how much of it is visible from here".
Stop reading about winners. Find them yourself.
Search 15M+ brands, their ads, revenue, and products — all in one place.
Try Brandsearch freeThe twenty-minute workflow
Tools are only worth their price if they change a decision. This is the Monday morning process, kept from the previous version of this article because it is the part readers actually use.
1. Scan across platforms. Open Discovery and move between the Meta, TikTok, Instagram and Email tabs. Presets do the first filter in one click.
Read one card and you have the shape of the whole view. Scissor Tech is running 50 of 141 ads, the oldest 278 days old, against 68.3k impressions and €786 of disclosed spend at €4 a day, 100% of it in the UK. That is an ad-level spend figure, not a brand-level estimate, and it is there because the UK requires it.
2. Filter to your niche. The preset is deliberately broad. Narrow by niche and language, then sort by longest running, so you are looking at what has been profitable for months rather than days.
3. Check the business, not just the ad. This is where most people stop. Click into the brand instead.
Three things decide it. The traffic trend, where up 30% month over month is good and flat despite heavy spend is a pass. The revenue estimate against product count, because a single-product store doing $500k a month is carrying the whole business on one item. And which platforms are active, since a product running on Meta and TikTok and Google is not a single-channel fluke.
The card above is the trap in one image. Everyday Dose has taken its live ad count from 136 to 1,088, up 279% in a month, while revenue drifted from $6.0M down to about $5.7M. Copy that brand's creative because it is running a lot of it and you are copying a brand whose spend is not yet working.
4. Study the strategy, not the creative. Once the business checks out, the Hooks and Scripts tabs show which opening lines survived and the Copy tab shows every headline tested this quarter. You are extracting patterns, hook type, format, offer structure, because patterns transfer between niches and specific creatives do not. Done at scale, that is exactly how the hook and format patterns that survived across 500 creatives were found.
5. Validate the market. Open Brand Library and check how many other brands sell into the same demand, and whether they are growing. One winner is an anecdote. A category of them is a market.
The filter worth knowing about is the subniche chip on any brand card. It runs a broad AI match rather than a keyword search, so filtering on Mushroom Coffee returns 1,600 stores and puts Owala, a water bottle brand doing $2.3M a day and up 26%, directly above RYZE. Owala sells no coffee. It is there because it is winning the same shelf and the same buyer, which is the thing a competitor list will never tell you.
The free options, and where they stop
Before paying anything, two official sources cover more ground than most people expect, and both are free.
Meta's Ad Library carries every active ad on Facebook and Instagram, searchable by advertiser, and for ads served in the EU and UK it publishes spend ranges and reach. TikTok's Commercial Content Library does the same for TikTok in the EU.
They stop in the same four places, and the gaps are the reason paid tools exist at all.
No cross-brand view. You search one advertiser at a time. There is no way to ask which brands in a category are scaling, because the question spans advertisers and the library is built around one.
No history. Both show what is running now. An ad that stopped last month is gone, so you cannot tell a hook that survived two years from one that launched on Tuesday, and survival is most of the signal.
No ranking. You get a list, not an order. Nothing tells you which of a brand's 738 ads pointed at the page that mattered.
No spend outside Europe. The disclosure rules that make spend public are European. For a US-only advertiser the field is empty, and that is a property of the regulation rather than of any tool.
If your question is "what is this one brand running right now", the free libraries answer it completely and you should not pay for anything. If your question involves more than one brand, or last quarter, or an order of importance, that is where they run out.
Compare brands side by side instead of one at a time
How to actually choose one
Three questions settle it faster than any feature matrix.
Are you researching creative, or researching brands? Foreplay's pricing is built around seats and saved brands, which is a creative team's shape. Trendtrack's is built around how many brands you track. AdSpyder's is built around how many ads you can search. Those are three different jobs.
Do you need TikTok specifically? PiPiADS ranks first organically for that intent and is the most cited option, though you will have to request a price.
Do you need to prove spend, or just find ideas? If a number is going into a plan someone will be held to, engagement proxies are not enough, and the disclosed European figures are the only published ones available.
The query behind this article
The spend and rank figures above come from one endpoint. This is the real call:
curl -s -H "X-API-Key: $BRANDSEARCH_API_KEY" \
"https://api.brandsearch.co/v1/brands/by-url/feelreformed.com?fields=id,monthly_visits,min_revenue,max_revenue,last_meta_active_count,growth_30d"
The index behind it is 223M ads (120.8M Meta and 102.5M TikTok) across 13.7M stores, 9M of them Shopify. The same data runs over MCP, so Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT can query it in a sentence.
Related reading
For what the data looks like applied to a single category, there is mushroom coffee revenue across the top 10 brands. For the creative side, there is 23 DTC ad examples with the spend and reach attached.
Questions people ask
What is the best ad spy tool?
There is no single answer, because the tools are priced around different jobs. On verified pricing, AdSpyder is the cheapest entry at $10 a month, Foreplay is the most team-oriented at $59 to $459, and Trendtrack and Minea both start at $49.
Are ad spy tools legal?
Yes. Every ad these tools index is one the platform already publishes. Meta's Ad Library and TikTok's Commercial Content Library are public, and EU and UK rules require spend and reach disclosure on ads served there.
What is the best free ad spy tool?
The Meta Ad Library and TikTok's Commercial Content Library are free and official. BigSpy advertises a free tier, though its pricing page would not render a figure when we checked.
Do ad spy tools show real ad spend?
Mostly no. Most report engagement proxies such as likes, comments and days running. Actual spend is published only for ads served in the EU and UK, where disclosure rules require it.
How much do ad spy tools cost?
Verified entry prices run from $10 a month to $69 a month, with top tiers between $99 and $459. Four widely recommended tools do not publish a readable price at all.
