Foreplay. $59/mo.
The pitch: the ad research platform for creative teams. Save competitor ads into a Swipe File, browse a community ad library in Discovery, track competitor pages with Spyder, read creative numbers in Lens, turn the winners into briefs. Chrome extension, mobile app, API, MCP server. Basic is $59 a month billed monthly, $49 a month if you pay for the year, one user included, $20 a month for every extra seat. Workflow is $175 and Agency is $459.
The reality: the source data is public and it is free. Meta’s Ad Library lives at facebook.com/ads/library with no login and no account, showing every active ad running on Facebook and Instagram, searchable by any advertiser’s name. What Foreplay adds on top is saving and sorting, which is a browser tab and a workspace folder. The Pillar 5 build turns that into one loop: pull the competitor ads you care about into your folder, then have Claude read them and hand back the hooks, the angles, the landing page types, and next week’s creative brief. That runs on the $20 a month Claude plan, against the $588 a year Basic takes out of your pocket on annual billing, $708 if you pay month to month.
What Foreplay still gives you that the free build doesn’t: Spyder, on the plans that include it, watches competitor pages around the clock and keeps up to three years of ad history you cannot pull out of a library that only shows what is running today. The Chrome extension saves in one click across Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts instead of you screenshotting. Discovery hands you ads from brands you have never heard of, which is the part manual research is worst at. And the shared library with comments and ratings matters the second more than one person is looking. If you run creative for ten brands and four strategists need one swipe file everybody can see, keep it. If you are researching three competitors for your own business, you are paying $588 a year to organize a free public website.
Replacing Foreplay with the free Ad Library and the Pillar 5 build pays for the entire Vault subscription nearly five times over in year one.