What HVAC Meta ads actually cost
Two separate bills, and most quotes blur them. What you pay Meta, and what you pay someone to manage what you pay Meta.
The two numbers
Ad spend goes to Meta. It is billed to your card by Meta, it is yours, and it should sit in an ad account you own rather than one belonging to your agency. A management fee goes to the agency for running it. These are different money and an agency quoting one number for both is doing you no favours.
A useful sanity check on any proposal: ask what the total monthly outlay is, and then ask what share of it Meta actually receives. If the answer is not immediate, ask again.
What the agencies on this ledger publish
Most publish nothing at all, which is why the spend band criterion exists and why it scores the published figure rather than the real one. Of the nine listed, three publish an ad spend figure of any kind.
RS Gonzales publishes a minimum ad spend of $3,000 a month alongside management fee bands. Service Allies recommends a starting budget of $2,000 to $3,000 a month. Foxxr publishes $500 to $1,500 a month per location, which is the only per-location figure in the set and is the shape multi-site contractors actually budget in. All three are their own published figures rather than anything we measured.
Why a minimum exists at all
Meta needs roughly fifty optimisation events per ad set per week to get out of the learning phase and deliver predictably. At a cost per lead somewhere in the double digits, that arithmetic sets a floor below which the account never stabilises, and the money is spent on noise.
That is the honest reason for a minimum. An agency that cannot explain its minimum in those terms has picked a number it likes rather than one the platform requires.
What to watch in the contract
Who owns the ad account and the pixel. If the answer is the agency, you cannot leave without losing the account history that makes the next agency effective.
Whether the fee is a percentage of spend. It is common, and it means the person advising you to increase your budget is paid more when you do.
Notice period, and what happens to the campaigns on the day you give it.