Meta's floor buys delivery
Vizup: $1 to $5 a day depending on setup, about $1 for impressions. With a cost-per-result goal, Meta says budget at least five times the target: a $10 target needs $50 a day. It buys delivery, not data.
What is the minimum budget to start Meta ads?
Meta's technical floor is about $1 to $5 a day per ad set, but that only buys impressions. To get usable purchase or lead data, plan on $30 to $50 a day for a small ecommerce store and $50 or more a day for lead generation. The rule behind these numbers: Meta's delivery system wants roughly 50 optimization events per ad set per week to leave the learning phase, so a workable daily budget is about your target cost per result times 50, divided by 7.
- Awareness or creative testing$10 to $25 a day
- Retargeting$20 to $50 a day
- Traffic$25 to $50 a day
- Leads$50 to $150 a day
- Sales or conversions$75 to $200 a day
- Advantage+ sales$100 or more a day
What drives the answer
About 50 results a week
Meta wants about 50 optimization events, such as purchases or leads, per ad set a week to leave learning. Vizup and Aimerce: daily budget = target cost per result x 50, divided by 7.
What you sell
Aimerce: most Shopify stores need $30 to $50 a day. Products under $30 need $75 to $100 a day, as each sale is worth less; over $100, $200 or more, as each sale is rarer.
A smaller profitability test
For a profitability test, Aimerce relaxes the rule to 15 to 25 purchases: at a $30 to $50 cost per purchase, that works out to $40 to $70 a day.
There are two minimums, and confusing them is the most common first-campaign mistake. One is what Meta will accept. The other is what produces a result you can learn from, and the learning-phase math sets it: at a $30 cost per purchase, 50 purchases a week is roughly $215 a day, or about $1,500 a week, for one ad set. SuperScale's version of the same arithmetic: a $5 cost per result needs about $36 a day, $20 needs about $143, and $38 needs about $271. Almost no small business starts there, which is why the practical ranges in the chart exist.
If you can only spend $10 a day
Aimerce's answer is that $10 a day rarely generates enough purchase volume to make reliable optimization decisions. It still has uses:
- Test creative with an engagement or traffic objective, where small budgets produce readable click-through rates.
- Run one ad set, not three. Splitting $10 across audiences starves all of them.
- Retarget site visitors, where the audience is small and the budget goes further.
What to do
- Work out your target cost per result from margin, then size the budget from it rather than from a round number.
- Start with one campaign, one objective and one ad set.
- Run a full week before changing anything.
- Scale a winner by 1.5 to 2 times current spend, not tenfold, so delivery stays stable.
Frequently asked questions
You can, and for awareness or creative testing it is workable. For purchases, $5 a day at a $30 cost per result is about one sale a week, which is not enough signal for Meta or for you to optimize on.
Related questions
Sources
- 1.Vizup, Meta Ads Minimum Budget Requirements 2026 (May 2026) (checked 2026-10-13)
- 2.Aimerce, Is $10 a Day Enough to Get Purchases on Meta Ads? (March 2026) (checked 2026-10-13)
- 3.SuperScale, How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost (updated July 2026) (checked 2026-10-13)
This page is informational and reflects our own product and workflow recommendations, not professional or legal advice.