What Is a Realistic Paid Ads Budget for an Indie Game Kickstarter?
- Jun 7
- 6 min read
A realistic paid ads budget for an indie game Kickstarter starts at £500–£1,000 for pre-launch and scales from there based on your funding goal, timeline, and how aggressively you want to grow.
This is the question every indie developer asks: " What should my ad budget be?'. This is usually after they've already decided they want to run ads, but have no idea what they're supposed to spend. And it's a fair question, because the answers you'll find online range from 'you need $10k minimum' to 'you can do it for $100.' Neither of those is helpful.
The honest answer is: it depends on what you're trying to raise, how much time you have, and how well your creative performs. But there are some sensible benchmarks that will stop you from either blowing your entire development budget on ads or setting yourself up to fail with a budget so small the algorithm can't learn.
Key Takeaways
The general rule of thumb is whatever you're looking to raise as your target goal, us 20-30% for an advertising budget
$500–$1,000 is a reasonable pre-launch starting point. It's enough to build a small audience, test creatives, and arrive on launch day with momentum.
Budget is not the most important variable. Creative quality and audience targeting will determine your cost-per-lead more than how much you spend.
Split your budget into two phases: pre-launch (audience building) and live campaign (conversion and retargeting).
Target a ROAS of 3x–5x or higher. If your ads are converting at that rate, scaling the budget is a straightforward decision.
Start smaller than you think you need to. Test, optimise, then scale into what's working. Don't go all-in from day one.
Why There's No Single Right Answer
Ad budget is tied directly to your funding goal. A campaign trying to raise £5,000 and a campaign trying to raise £100,000 are not running the same ads with the same budget. The logic is simple: ads need to generate enough interest in Followers and Pledges to justify the spend, and that threshold looks different at every scale.
There are a few variables that actually drive what you need to spend:
Your funding goal: higher goals require a bigger pre-launch audience, which requires more ad spend
Your timeline: 8 weeks of pre-launch gives you time to test and optimise; 3 weeks doesn't
Your creative quality: strong gameplay video hooks will cost you $1.70–$2.50 per Kickstarter follower; weak creatives can hit $4–$6+
Your existing audience: if you already have 2,000 social followers who are highly engaged with your posts, your ads are building on top of something; if you're starting from zero, the ads carry more weight
The Two-Phase Budget Model
The biggest mistake developers make is treating ads as a single block of spend. You actually need to think in two phases with different objectives and different budget logic.
Phase 1: Pre-Launch (6–8 Weeks Out)
The goal here is to build your Kickstarter follower count and email list. You're not trying to get pledges yet — you're building the warm audience that will convert to backers when the campaign goes live.
Campaign Size | Pre-Launch Budget | Follower Target |
Small / solo dev | $500–$1,000 | 200-500 followers |
Mid-size indie | $1,000–$2,500 | 500–1,500 followers |
Ambitious launch | $2,500–$5,000+ | 1,000–3,000+ followers |
These ranges assume competent, creative and reasonable targeting. If your cost-per-follower is running high, the priority is fixing the creative — not dumping more budget into an underperforming setup.
Phase 2: Live Campaign (Days 1–30)
Once your campaign is live, your budget objective shifts from acquisition to conversion. You're retargeting warm audiences — people who visited your page, engaged with pre-launch ads, or are on your email list — and pushing them to pledge.
Live campaign ad spend typically runs at a lower daily rate than pre-launch because you're working a warmer, smaller audience rather than cold targeting at scale. A typical live campaign ad budget sits at $500–$2,000 for a mid-size indie game, skewed toward the first week and final 48 hours when conversion rates are highest.
The Tails of Fate Example The live campaign for Tails of Fate achieved a 2.6x ROAS on paid ads — meaning for every $1 spent on ads during the campaign, $2.60 came back in pledges. That kind of return is achievable, but it requires the pre-launch work to have been done properly. The live campaign ROAS is made or lost in the pre-launch phase. |
What Affects Your Cost Per Follower
Your cost per Kickstarter follower is the single most important metric in your pre-launch campaign. Here's what moves it:
Creative quality
A compelling 15-second gameplay clip showing your game's best moment will dramatically outperform a static image or a generic announcement video. Games with strong visual identity — distinctive art styles, satisfying gameplay loops, clear genre signals — naturally get better costs because the ad itself does the selling.
Below is a small list of some of the ads I ran for Ghost Vanguard's live campaign to vary our creative testing. These included:
Best-selling rewards
Stretch goal updates (retargeting audiences)
Short gameplay clip - unedited
Gameplay edited with logo, call to action and available platforms.
Capsule art edited for Stories with a call to action and available platforms.
Audience targeting
Interest-based targeting on Meta lets you reach players of comparable games, fans of specific genres, and people who have backed Kickstarter projects before. Good targeting means your ad lands in front of people who would actually back your game — not just people who vaguely like video games.
Campaign page quality
If someone clicks your ad and lands on a Kickstarter pre-launch page that's half-finished, vague, or unconvincing, they won't follow. Your cost per follower is partly a function of your ad's quality and partly a function of what happens after the click. Both matter.
⚠️ Don't Launch Ads Without These in Place Before spending a single penny on ads, make sure your Kickstarter pre-launch page is live, your Meta Pixel is set up correctly, and you have at least 3–5 creative variants to test. Running ads without tracking in place means you can't optimise — you're just burning budget. |
When to Scale Up
Once you've been running pre-launch ads for 2–3 weeks, you'll have real data on what's working. If your cost per follower is sitting comfortably under the $2.20 mark and your creatives are holding performance, that's the signal to scale. Doubling or tripling budget on a proven setup is how you build from 500 followers to 2,000 in the weeks before launch.
If costs are running high, pause first. Test new creative angles. Tighten your audience. Fix the underlying problem before adding more spend to it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I run Kickstarter ads for under £500?
You can test the water but $500 is about the minimum to generate meaningful data and build a follower base worth launching to. Below that, the algorithm doesn't have enough spend to learn, and you'll end up with patchy results that don't tell you much. If budget is very tight, put what you have into the final 2 weeks of pre-launch rather than spreading it thinly across 8 weeks.
Should my ad budget come out of my Kickstarter goal?
No, and this is a common mistake. Your ad budget should be funded separately, either from your own resources or from pre-campaign savings. If you're relying on campaign funds to pay for the ads that generate those funds, you're in a chicken-and-egg situation. Plan the ad budget as a business cost separate from your development and fulfilment budget.
What ROAS should I aim for?
A 3x–5x ROAS on your live campaign ads is a solid benchmark. Tails of Fate achieved 2.6x, which sounds lower, but the pre-launch ads (which aren't counted in live ROAS) had already built the audience that converted on day one. Look at total campaign ROI across both phases, not just the live campaign number in isolation. Industry average is around 2x-3x
Does a bigger budget always mean better results?
No. Budget amplifies what's already working. If your creative is weak, your targeting is off, or your Kickstarter page isn't converting visitors to followers, adding more budget just means losing money faster. Fix the fundamentals first. Then scale.
Launching your game on Kickstarter?
Full Charge helps indie developers build the audience, strategy, and ads needed to launch funded campaigns.
Get in touch at fullcharge.games — the earlier you start, the better your launch.
