What Meta ads really cost a Shopify store in Montreal in 2026

Every week an owner in Montreal or Laval asks me some version of the same question: what does it cost to run ads on Instagram and Facebook, and is it worth it for a store my size. The honest answer has three parts, and most agencies only talk about one of them.

Cost one: the ad spend itself

This is the money Meta charges to show your ads. It goes to Meta, not to the agency, and it should always go there directly from your own card in your own ad account. If an agency asks you to pay the spend through them, ask why. The usual reason is a markup you can’t see.

How much is enough? Meta’s system needs a few sales a week per ad set to learn who buys. For a store with a $60 to $200 order, that means a floor of roughly $100 a day, or $3,000 a month. Below that, the campaign never leaves the learning phase and every number you look at is noise. I don’t take on ad management under that floor, because I’d be charging you for a test that can’t succeed.

Cost two: the management

This is what you pay a person or an agency to plan, build, watch and adjust the campaigns. The 2026 Foxwell Founders survey of over two hundred agencies puts the typical fee for accounts under $100,000 a month in spend at $2,500 to $5,000 a month, without creative. Local agencies in Montreal and Laval land in the same range, sometimes lower for smaller accounts.

What matters more than the number is what it includes. Ask:

• Do I own the ad account, the pixel and the data, or does the agency?
• Is there a contract term, or is it month to month?
• Who actually works on my account each week, and can I talk to them?

My own answer to those: you own everything, month to month, and you talk to me.

Cost three: the creative

This is the one people forget, and it’s the one that decides whether the campaign works. Meta’s algorithm does most of the targeting now. The ad itself, the video or image someone sees while scrolling, is where the difference is made.

Motion’s 2026 creative benchmark, built on more than six thousand ad accounts, found that accounts spending $10,000 to $50,000 a month launch about four new creatives a week on average. The top quarter of accounts launch about eight. And only around one in twenty ads turns out to be a winner. So volume isn’t optional; it’s the job.

Buying that volume the traditional way is expensive. Creator videos run $70 to $90 each on marketplaces like Trend.io, and studio production costs far more. That’s why I build creative around your real footage and use AI tools for the scenes you can’t film, which brings the cost of a week’s worth of ads down to something a small store can sustain.

Putting it together

For a Montreal store doing $20,000 to $150,000 a month, a realistic first budget looks like this:

The question to ask isn’t whether that’s a lot. It’s whether you’d know, at the end of the month, what you kept after all of it. Most owners can’t answer that, because nobody gives them the number. That weekly number is the first thing I set up, before any ad runs.

If you want to see what your own numbers say, send me a message. A first look at your store takes me an afternoon.