You found the provider in a Telegram group, or in the replies under somebody's post about a disabled account. The pricing is 3 lines long, the reply came back in 90 seconds, and they want the first payment before they will tell you anything specific. These are the 15 questions that pull the specifics out before your money moves, and what a real answer to each sounds like.
Ask these 4 first. Most conversations end here.
Access questions get vague answers faster than anything else, which is why they go first. Somebody running a real portfolio answers all 4 in under 60 seconds, because the answers never change from client to client. A reseller who bought access from somebody else has to go away and ask, and you can hear the gap.
- 1. What role do I get, and on which asset? Meta has 2 layers here and providers blur them constantly. At the asset level the ad account roles are advertiser, analyst and admin: advertiser runs campaigns and budgets but sees no billing and no user list, analyst sees reporting only, admin can touch users, billing and account settings. At the portfolio level the split is partial access against full control. Ask which layer they mean, get the answer in writing, then check it yourself in Business Settings on the first day rather than trusting the sales version.
- 2. How many other advertisers sit in that portfolio with me? Meta enforces at the business level as well as the ad account level, so the neighbours matter. Ask how accounts are segmented, how many sit under a single business portfolio, and what the process is when the account beside yours gets hit. A shrug here is the answer to the question.
- 3. Whose Page runs the ads? If it is their Page, every comment, every review and every piece of social proof you build sits on an asset you cannot log into. If it is your Page, ask exactly what access they need to it, at what role, and how fast that access comes off after you leave.
- 4. Whose dataset fires, and can mine be assigned in? Events, custom audiences and lookalikes built inside their dataset sit with the business that owns that dataset. Meta does let a dataset owner assign a partner business by ID, so ask directly whether they accept a partner assignment of your dataset from your own business, at what task level, and what happens to that assignment the day an account is replaced.
The money questions, and the ones underneath them
Everyone asks the price. Almost nobody asks the 5 questions that decide what the price actually turns out to be, and that is where the cost hides.
- 5. Flat rate, or a cut of spend, and a cut of what exactly? Percentage models charge on the top up, on the spend, or on both, and at volume the difference is large. Ask whether the percentage applies to spend that Meta later credits back, and whether it applies to a balance you fund and never spend. Read the full comparison of a flat fee against a percentage of spend before you agree to either.
- 6. What is the minimum top up, and how long does it take to land? A top up that takes 6 hours to clear is 6 hours of delivery you lose every time you misjudge a weekend. Ask which funding rails they support: crypto, bank transfer, card. Crypto only is not disqualifying on its own, but it means there is no reversal path if the provider goes quiet on you.
- 7. Where does an unspent balance go if the account dies? This is the highest dollar question on the list and it reliably gets the vaguest answer. Ask 2 versions of it. What happens to the balance when Meta disables the account, and what happens to it when you cancel. Then ask for both in writing, because a screenshot of a chat message is the only record you will have.
- 8. Can I connect my own card so Meta bills me directly? Some arrangements work that way, and it removes the whole category of problem in question 7, because there is no float sitting with a third party at any point. It also means the billing relationship you can see in Ads Manager matches the money leaving your bank. If the answer is no, question 7 gets more important, not less.
- 9. What is the term, the notice period and the refund position? Monthly with cancel any time is a different product from a 3 month minimum. Ask whether there is a trial, what happens to unused days if you leave mid month, and whether cancelling cuts the account off that day or at the end of the period you already paid for.
Questions about the account, not about your offer
Providers like talking about your offer, because it moves the conversation onto ground where they get to qualify you. Move it back. You are buying an account, and accounts have specifics that can be stated.
- 10. What is the spend limit on day 1, and what actually raises it? There are 2 different limits here and they get mixed up constantly. The account spending limit is the cap you set yourself and can change at will. The daily spending limit is set by Meta, and Meta's own help pages describe applying them to new business portfolios, new ad accounts and new Pages, as well as to accounts with policy or quality problems. Meta points at completing business verification and keeping a clean payment record as what moves it. So ask for the starting number, the ceiling on the tier you are buying, whether the business behind it is already verified, and what has actually cleared through that account before. Published spend ceilings by tier are a good sign. Invented ones tend to be round numbers delivered very fast.
- 11. What is behind the account: age, spend, payment history? The reason accounts behave differently is not a setting anyone toggled. It is a record of payments that cleared, month after month, at size. An account issued off a portfolio moving real monthly volume carries that record with it. If you want the mechanism rather than the sales version, payment history is what people actually mean by bulletproof.
- 12. Will you look at my product and my landing page before you take money? A provider who boards anything is a provider who has never had to defend a portfolio. The good ones ask what you sell, open the page, and say no sometimes. Being told no before you pay is worth considerably more than being told yes and finding out in week 2.
What happens when it breaks, written down
Every account eventually stops working. A restriction, a review, an outright ban, a payment method that fails at 2am. Nobody sells you the account you get on that day, so ask about that day now, while they still want your money.
- 13. Replacement terms, in specifics. How fast, how many are included, at what cost, and does the balance move across with you? Ask whether replacement covers policy bans or only technical failures, because that is where the exclusion usually lives. Have your own side ready too, since moving a live campaign onto a replacement asset is far quicker when the creative, the audiences and the campaign exports already exist.
- 14. Who answers at 11pm on a Friday? Get a name, a channel and a number of hours. Support that runs 9 to 5 in a timezone 8 hours away is support that does not exist on the day you actually need it, and Friday night is when accounts go down. Ask what the median response time was last month, not what the target is.
- 15. What happened to the last 3 accounts you issued in my vertical? No provider has clean numbers here and you are not expecting them to. You are watching the shape of the answer. Somebody who says 1 is still running, 1 was replaced last quarter and 1 got restricted after a landing page change is somebody who tracks it. Somebody who says all of them are fine has never looked.
3 answers that sound fine and are not
Some replies pass on first read and fail on the second. These 3 come up constantly, and each tells you something the person did not intend to tell you.
- The claim that no account of theirs has ever been banned. Nobody running volume can say that truthfully. Accounts get restricted, and the useful question is what happens in the next 2 hours, not whether it happens at all. An absolute claim here means the rest of the answers were also written to sound good rather than to be true.
- The line that 3% is only 3%. 3% of $80,000 a month is $2,400 a month, every month, on an account that costs the provider the same whether you run $8,000 or $800,000 through it. Run the arithmetic at your actual spend level before you agree that it is nothing. It gets loud somewhere around $30,000 a month and it never gets quieter, because the fee grows precisely when the campaign starts working.
- Unlimited spend from day 1. Meta sets the daily spending limit, and a provider controls their side of the ceiling, not Meta's. Unlimited on a price sheet means they will not cap you. It does not mean a cold account will move $20,000 tomorrow, and any provider who lets you believe otherwise has just told you how the rest of the relationship will go.
How to run the conversation so the answers are worth having
Ask all 15 in a single message, in writing, before you discuss price. That is the test, not the questions. A provider issuing accounts off a portfolio they control answers a long list in a single reply because none of it requires checking with anyone. A reseller answers the easy 6 immediately and comes back on the rest hours later, or answers the whole thing in generalities that could describe any provider in the market.
Keep the thread. Do not move to a call and then take the terms on trust, because a call leaves you with nothing to point at in week 6 when the balance question becomes real. If they will only answer by voice, ask them to send a summary afterwards, and treat a refusal as data. Then hold the first payment to the smallest amount that gets you a live account, run something small through it, and watch what happens to delivery, to support response times and to billing before you move real budget onto it.
The trade off, stated plainly
Here is the part that does not go on a pricing page. An agency account is not yours. You are a guest on somebody else's portfolio, and if that provider goes quiet, changes terms, or loses the portfolio behind the accounts, you go down with it. No amount of vetting removes that. What the 15 questions do is tell you how much of that risk you are carrying, whether any of it is written down, and whether the person on the other end has ever thought about it.
The version worth paying for answers most of these before you ask. A flat monthly rate, so the bill does not grow every time a campaign works. 0% of ad spend, so scaling costs nothing extra. Accounts issued in 1 to 2 hours off a portfolio running around $50 million a month, replacements when an account goes down, and a top tier where your own card is billed by Meta directly so nobody else is ever holding your float. All of that is checkable, which is the whole point, and the published answers to questions like these should be sitting on a page you can read before you talk to a single person.