Is Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) or Foreplay cheaper?

Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) starts at $49 per month (Essential, up to $10,000 monthly ad spend) (free plan available). Foreplay starts at $59 per month (Basic, monthly billing) or $49 per month billed annually (7 days trial).

Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) vs Foreplay

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) compared with Foreplay

These sit on opposite ends of the creative pipeline and do not overlap. Foreplay is research and production: ad library search, competitor tracking, swipe files, and briefs for the people making the ads. Bïrch is distribution and control: launching those ads in bulk and governing their budgets with rules. A creative-led ecommerce team commonly runs Foreplay upstream at $59 a month and Bïrch downstream at $99.

Foreplay compared with Bïrch (formerly Revealbot)

Complementary rather than competing. Bïrch launches and governs ads with rules that execute across Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat for $99 a month at the entry bracket. Foreplay decides what those ads should be, for $59 flat. The practical difference is that Bïrch's fee grows with your ad spend and Foreplay's grows with your headcount. A four-person creative team spending heavily will find Foreplay the cheaper of the two over time.

Choose Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) if

Performance media buyers and agencies running more than one paid social network who want standing automation that executes on the account, and who spend enough that a $99 to $299 monthly platform fee is a rounding error against the waste a well-written pause rule prevents.

Choose Foreplay if

Creative strategists, in-house paid social teams, and performance agencies producing a steady volume of Meta and TikTok creative, who need competitor intelligence, an organized swipe file the whole team can work from, and briefs that go to editors without a separate document ritual.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Bïrch (formerly Revealbot)	Foreplay
Category	Paid Ads	Paid Ads
Starting price	$49 per month (Essential, up to $10,000 monthly ad spend) (free plan available)	$59 per month (Basic, monthly billing) or $49 per month billed annually (7 days trial)
Pricing model	Subscription priced by the cumulative monthly ad spend of every connected ad account, in two feature tiers plus a separate event-based price for Signals Gateway.	Flat per-plan subscription with included seats and per-seat overage, unrelated to ad spend, plus metered API credit packs.
Free plan	Signals Gateway is permanently free up to 10,000 events per month, and Stage currently has a free version; the core automation platform has no free tier.	No
Free trial	14 days with unlimited access to all features and no credit card required	7 days, credit card required, auto-converts to paid unless cancelled
Best for	Performance media buyers and agencies running more than one paid social network who want standing automation that executes on the account, and who spend enough that a $99 to $299 monthly platform fee is a rounding error against the waste a well-written pause rule prevents.	Creative strategists, in-house paid social teams, and performance agencies producing a steady volume of Meta and TikTok creative, who need competitor intelligence, an organized swipe file the whole team can work from, and briefs that go to editors without a separate document ritual.
Setup time	An afternoon. Start the fourteen-day trial with no credit card, connect your ad account profiles, and assign accounts to Workspaces. Signals Gateway is a separate deployment requiring the gateway pixel or mobile SDK and destination configuration, and its setup time is not published.	Minutes. Sign up, install the Chrome extension, and start saving ads. There is no pixel, no code, and no account permission required for the research half of the product. Lens is the one exception and requires connecting a Meta ad account by OAuth.
Learning curve	Steep, and this is the main implementation risk. The rule builder is powerful precisely because it does not simplify media buying, and reviewers repeatedly say it assumes knowledge it does not teach. Strategies and the AI rule-suggestion feature exist specifically to soften this, and both are worth using in week one.	Low. Discovery and the swipe file are immediately obvious to anyone who has ever screenshotted a competitor's ad. Briefs takes an afternoon to set up properly, mostly in building brand profiles. Lens takes longer to interpret usefully, because reading creative attribute performance is a skill rather than a feature.
Platforms	Web application at app.bir.ch, Slack app via the Slack Marketplace, Read-only MCP connector	Web application, Chrome extension, iOS and Android mobile app, Hosted MCP server
Compliance	GDPR with a published Data Processing Agreement, CCPA covered in the DPA, No public SOC 2 attestation found	No SOC 2, GDPR, or CCPA posture published
Founded	2016	2021
Headquarters	New York, New York, United States, with a distributed team across three continents	Toronto, Canada
Ownership	Bootstrapped	Bootstrapped

Strengths and limitations

Bïrch (formerly Revealbot)

Strengths

Genuine multi-network automation: rules execute on Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat, not just Meta with reporting badges for the rest.
The rule builder is the most expressive at this price, with nested AND and OR logic, metric-to-metric comparison, and ranking conditions rather than simple threshold triggers.
Bootstrapped and profitable-shaped, with no venture pressure to reprice, and a documented, plain-language help centre that explains billing and cancellation consequences honestly.
Flat bracket pricing rather than a percentage of spend, so the fee stays a fraction of one percent of media even at scale.

Limitations

The rule builder assumes media-buying expertise and does not teach it, which is the most consistent complaint from newer users.
Essential at $49 excludes automated rules, Launcher, and Stage, so the cheap tier is not a smaller version of the product but a different and much thinner one.
Billing counts cumulative spend across all connected ad accounts rather than spend Bïrch influences, which surprises agencies who connect client accounts for reporting.
Monthly plans face overage charges while annual plans face a rule-editing lockout when you exceed your bracket, and some teams find the lockout operationally worse than a fee.

Foreplay

Strengths

Flat pricing that does not scale with ad spend, which over a growth year is worth more than any single feature in this category.
The entry plan is the full product rather than a stripped tier, so a solo strategist gets Discovery, Spyder, Briefs, Lens, API access, and MCP for $59 a month.
Spyder's permanent archiving is genuinely valuable, because public ad libraries drop ads when advertisers delete them and your archive keeps them.
Automatic transcription on save makes a swipe file searchable by hook, which is the difference between a reference library and a folder nobody opens.

Limitations

Social only. No Google Search ads, no Snapchat Ads, no YouTube Ads as an account integration, so the tool is much less useful the moment search enters your mix.
Lens connects to Meta ad account performance; support for TikTok or other ad accounts in Lens was not found, which narrows the analytics layer to one network.
No free tier and a trial that requires a card and auto-converts, so evaluation carries a real risk of an unwanted charge.
Annual plans are explicitly non-refundable on cancellation, which is a hard commitment for a tool many people buy on a project basis.

Pricing compared

Bïrch (formerly Revealbot)

Subscription priced by the cumulative monthly ad spend of every connected ad account, in two feature tiers plus a separate event-based price for Signals Gateway.

Essential$49
Pro$99
EnterpriseNegotiated

Bïrch is the best-value automation platform in this category for anyone running more than one paid social network, and the arithmetic is not close. Pro at $99 a month buys a rules engine that executes on Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat, a bulk launcher, cross-network reporting, and an audience builder, and even at $100,000 of monthly spend the reported $299 rate is roughly three tenths of one percent of media. Compare that to any tool charging a percentage of ad spend and the gap widens every month you grow. The two things that erode the value are the Essential tier, which withholds the actual product for half the price and wastes a lot of buyers' first month, and the billing basis, which counts spend on accounts you connected purely for reporting.

Foreplay

Flat per-plan subscription with included seats and per-seat overage, unrelated to ad spend, plus metered API credit packs.

Basic$59
Workflow$175
Agency$459
EnterpriseNegotiated

For a team producing paid social creative at any volume, Basic at $59 a month is one of the better-value subscriptions in this whole directory, because it is flat. Everything else in the paid ads category charges you more as you grow, and Foreplay charges the same at $100,000 of monthly spend as at $5,000. You are buying research, organization, and briefing infrastructure that would otherwise live in a Google Doc and a folder of screenshots, plus a creative analytics layer that Meta itself does not provide. The value collapses in two situations: if you advertise on search rather than social, where coverage is essentially absent, and if you produce a handful of ads a year, where a swipe file and a competitor tracker are solving a problem you do not have.

Editorial verdict on each

Bïrch (formerly Revealbot)

Best Value

Bïrch is the best-value paid ads automation platform a small business can buy, and the bootstrapped ownership shows in ways that matter: published entry pricing, a help centre that tells you plainly that disconnecting an account turns your rules into drafts, and a flat bracket fee rather than a percentage of your growth. The rules engine executes across four networks with logic that most competitors at three times the price cannot express. Two caveats. The Essential tier withholds the actual product and should be ignored, so budget for Pro. And the learning curve is real: this tool rewards someone who already knows why they want a rule and punishes someone hoping the software will decide for them. If you have that knowledge and more than one paid social channel, nothing else in this category gives you as much control per dollar.

Read the full Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) profile

Foreplay

Foreplay is the best creative research tool a small paid social team can buy, and the pricing is the quiet reason. In a category where nearly every vendor takes a bigger cut as you grow, Foreplay charges $59 a month whether you spend five thousand or a hundred thousand, and the entry plan is the whole product rather than a teaser. The swipe file, Spyder's permanent competitor archive, and the brief builder together replace a workflow most teams currently run out of a Google Doc, and Lens adds a creative-attribute view of performance that Meta does not provide. Buy it if creative is your bottleneck and your spend is on Meta and TikTok. Do not buy it if you advertise on search, if you expected it to manage campaigns, or if you need a vendor with a published security posture, because there is not one.

Read the full Foreplay profile

Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Foreplay last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.