Numbers · Published 2026-08-21 · 2 min read
The spend ceiling of a product
There is an unwritten notion of a product's spend ceiling: the daily budget above which buying simply stops paying back at target. And it runs into a whole pile of things at once — the size of the niche, the level of competition, the volume of audience, how fast you can produce creatives, and plain luck.
Take a growing niche with moderate competition, where dozens of products comfortably spend $10k+ a day on Meta. There your chances of reaching a similar spend are real. And then there is a niche whose peak was 2020–2023, after which the flood of AI burned it out. Today it has maybe three active players, and even they run up to $3k a day. Expecting to do volumes many times above the market there is naive.
I have two opposite cases in hand right now.
In the first, back in 2024 I found great creatives and pushed spend to $100–150k a month. Then it all burned out and buying had to be nearly stopped. Now I run it at $150–300 a day — and the bundle pays back beautifully. But raise the budget even to $1k and the trial price immediately goes up by 25–30% and running it stops making sense. The niche has simply thinned out.
The second product I have been running since the end of 2023: I held $5–7k daily at the start and I still hold it now. The trick is simple — roughly every six months we find a fat winner that carries over 50% of the spend, every two or three months a decent mid-tier one, plus a solid slice of the budget goes into localisations.
In short, every product has its own daily spend. It is tied to unit economics, to the payback period you planned for, and to your production resources. And the ceilings themselves often sit only in our heads. I was certain myself that in one category you could not run more than $3k a day. Then I saw a competitor's account spending close to $40k daily on a comparable app — and all of it in profit.
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