Hidden Costs of Building Your Own Ad Server

Why Most Companies Underestimate the Cost of Building an Ad Server

Many engineering teams believe they can build an ad server in a few months. On paper, showing an ad looks simple: upload a banner, add some rules, and display it. In reality, serious ad platforms are complex products. The major players — Google, Meta, Amazon — have teams of engineers dedicated to them.. and for a reason.

This leads to many non-ad tech companies assuming that ad serving is easy. As a result, most sites either never launch their in-house ad products, or they choose a rigid legacy ad server.

The Revenue Opportunity Most Publishers Ignore

Native ads and sponsored listings can add meaningful revenue without hurting user experience. Real examples: Chairish increased total revenue by 10% after integrating sponsored listings, and Ticketmaster multiplied revenue in certain placements by 6 times. Few product changes can move numbers like that.

Despite this, many teams delay ad projects because ads aren't seen as core product features. Without a clear plan or dedicated resources, the project simply never gets built.

What "Building an Ad Server" Actually Involves

If all you want is a simple banner rotator with no real targeting, reporting, or optimization, you can build it fast. But it won't sell. We're in 2025, and advertisers expect features such as:

• Reporting Dashboard
• Conversion Tracking
• Event Tracking
• Geotargeting
• Frequency Capping
• Bot Filtering
• Privacy Compliance
• First-Party ICP Targeting
• Search Term Targeting
• Budget Capping
• Pacing
• Creative Optimization
• Forecasting
• Campaign Scheduling
• Runtime Macros
• User Management & SSO

Launching with a basic tool won't attract buyers, and it won't retain them. You'll be competing for the same budgets in a single market; weak features simply won't survive.

The Hidden Cost: Scaling and Maintenance

Running an ad server is not a one-time engineering task. We've learned that the hard way with AdGlare. As traffic grows, so does the complexity. An ad server that handles 1M impressions per month behaves very differently at 100M or 500M. Advertisers expect near-perfect uptime, stable performance, and no ad serving errors.

Beyond scale, the ad tech ecosystem evolves constantly: privacy laws, fraud detection, viewability standards, video formats, new device types... the list is long. Staying compliant and competitive requires ongoing engineering work. Are you and your team ready for that?

A realistic rule of thumb: 1 dedicated ad tech engineer per 100M monthly ad requests. At 500M impressions/month, that means roughly five engineers. With average salaries, maintenance alone quickly reaches $600K+ per year.

Add tools, certifications, audits, and infrastructure, and yearly costs easily reach ~$800K. AdGlare however can reduce those costs considerably.

How AdGlare Bridges the Gap: Build Your Own Ad Server Without Starting From Zero

This is where AdGlare changes the equation. Instead of forcing you to choose between a fragile in-house built ad server or a way-too-rigid platform like GAM, you get a #3 option: clean ad server APIs you can build on top of. Your team keeps full control over the product experience, the UI, the workflows, and the logic that makes your ad platform unique — while AdGlare handles everything that's expensive, time-consuming, and risky to reinvent. Do I have your attention now? ;)

The core infrastructure is already solved: low-latency delivery, high uptime, native + display + video support, targeting logic, pacing, reporting pipelines, fraud checks, geo/IP/device lookups, CDN delivery, and all the messy ad tech edge cases. Your engineers don't have to spend months learning ad serving fundamentals or scaling the backend. They connect to clean, modern APIs and start building features on day one.

The result: time-to-market drops from 12-24 months to a few weeks. You avoid hiring an ad tech team, skip the hidden costs of audits and certifications, and eliminate the long-term maintenance burden. Instead of $800K+ per year in salaries and infrastructure, you get predictable pricing and a platform that already scales to billions of requests.

With AdGlare, you get both worlds: the flexibility of building your own ad product and the stability of enterprise-grade ad infrastructure. Your developers stay focused on innovation — not reinventing ad tech plumbing — and your business launches revenue-generating ad products fast.

When To Consider AdGlare

For teams that need an MVP this quarter - not next year - AdGlare lets you launch fast and validate your product before committing to a larger ad tech investment.

With AdGlare, you design the ad units yourself and keep them aligned with your platform's look and feel, while the API handles targeting, rotation, pacing, and delivery rules behind the scenes.

Consider AdGlare when:

• You want to launch an MVP in days, not in years
• You don't want to start from scratch, leaving ad decisioning and reporting to AdGlare
• You easily want to add features or tweak the code (HTML/CSS) of your ads
• You have a limited dev budget
• You don't want to spend on infrastructure and monitoring servers

A reason NOT to consider AdGlare is when you have no advertisers. We provide the tech, not the demand. You'll need to make deals with advertisers or have existing relationships.

Ready to See What You Can Build With AdGlare?

If you want to move faster, cut engineering costs, and launch ad products that actually scale, AdGlare gives you the tools to do it. You get enterprise-grade ad infrastructure, clean ad serving APIs, and a platform built for developers who want control without the headaches.

Start a free trial or explore the full list of features. It takes just minutes to get started. And once you see what's possible, you won't want to build ad tech any other way.