One job, done properly
Budget pacing was the product, not a feature bolted onto a reporting suite. Daily adjustments that kept monthly spend on plan, across many accounts at once — reliably enough that agencies built their workflow on it.
Alternatives · Shape.io
Life after Shape.io.
Shape earned its reputation as the dedicated PPC budget tool. In August 2022 NinjaCat acquired it, and shape.io now redirects into a broader marketing-data platform. If what you wanted was a focused tool that paces ad budgets, moves them well, and shows its working — here’s an honest look at whether ROASt fits.
// credit where it’s due
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What Shape got right
Plenty of “alternative” pages pretend the other tool was bad. Shape wasn’t. Three things it did well are the same three things we’d tell you to demand from anything that replaces it.
Budgets above accounts
Shape’s budgets pooled campaigns from different accounts under one monthly number. That’s the right mental model — clients think in budgets and goals, not in account boundaries.
Guardrails on the automation
Overspend protection and alerts meant you could actually leave it running. Automation you have to babysit isn’t automation — Shape understood that early.
If Shape worked for you, your instincts were right. The gap it
left isn’t pacing — pacing is table stakes now. The gap is the question
pacing alone never answered: where should the next pound go?
// the difference
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Pacing keeps you on plan. It doesn’t make the plan.
A pacing tool makes sure you spend what you intended. It doesn’t ask whether you intended the right split. ROASt does both: it fits a response curve to every campaign’s own history and moves each pound to its highest marginal return — then paces the result.
A curve per campaign
The engine fits Hill response curves to each campaign’s spend-vs-return history — 91 days, recent days weighted more — and refits them nightly. Two campaigns with identical average ROAS can hide wildly different headroom; the curves see it.
Allocation at the margin
Budget moves toward genuine headroom and away from saturation — where the next pound returns most, not where yesterday’s average looked best. That’s a calculus problem, and rules can’t solve it.
Pacing is built in
The engine paces the month, not just the day — with velocity caps, staged changes that you can review before they push, and kill switches at every level. The Shape habit of “set the month, trust the tool” carries straight over.
It grades itself
Every night the engine checks its own predictions against what actually happened and shows you the calibration score on your dashboard. No other budget tool we know of grades its own homework in front of you.
// side by side
Shape.io vs ROASt Labs
The Shape column describes the standalone product as it was publicly documented — the fairest comparison for anyone who used it and is deciding what replaces it.
| Capability | Shape.io (standalone) | ROASt Labs |
|---|---|---|
| Daily budget pacing | ✓The core product — and it was good | ✓Monthly pacing with nightly adjustments |
| Overspend protection | ✓Spend guardrails + alerts | ✓Velocity caps, staged changes, dry-run, kill switches |
| Budgets across accounts | ✓Budgets pooled campaigns across accounts | ✓Portfolios — one budget + one goal across Google, Microsoft & Meta |
| Decides where budget goes | ◐Pacing rules + recommendations | ✓Marginal-ROAS engine on fitted response curves |
| Shows its working | —Not a headline feature | ✓Every decision decomposes into its exact factors, every action logged |
| Grades its own predictions | —Not advertised | ✓Nightly calibration score, on your dashboard |
| AI team on the account | —Pre-dated the agent era | ✓Nine specialist agents — waste hunting, creative fatigue, pacing watch, briefs |
| Bring your own AI | — | ✓Flume chat in-app + MCP so Claude or your own tools can drive it |
| Ad platforms | ✓Google, Microsoft, Meta + a wider set of channels | ◐Google, Microsoft & Meta — three platforms, deeply |
| Available as a standalone tool | —Discontinued — shape.io redirects to NinjaCat | ✓ |
| Pricing | Now part of NinjaCat — quote-based | Public — from £119/$149 per month, 30-day free trial, no card up front |
Shape.io column based on the standalone product’s public documentation before the August 2022 NinjaCat acquisition, and NinjaCat’s current public pages (checked June 2026). Spotted something out of date or unfair? Tell us — [email protected] — and we’ll fix it.
// the honest bit
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When ROASt isn’t the answer
A comparison page you can trust has to cut both ways. Three reasons to look elsewhere:
You need a reporting studio
NinjaCat’s real strength is cross-channel reporting and dashboards at agency scale. ROASt is an optimisation engine that explains itself — not a client-branded report builder.
You buy beyond Google, Microsoft & Meta
If LinkedIn, Snapchat or Pinterest carry a big share of your spend, ROASt can’t move those budgets today. We’d rather go deep on three platforms than shallow on eight — but that trade-off should be yours to make.
You want keyword-level bid management
ROASt moves budgets and CPA/ROAS targets, hunts search-term waste and pauses fatigued creative. It doesn’t set keyword-level bids — the platforms’ own smart bidding does that better than rules ever did.
// questions
Shape.io alternative FAQ
The questions people actually ask when Shape comes up.
What happened to Shape.io?
NinjaCat acquired Shape in August 2022. The standalone product was wound down and shape.io now redirects to NinjaCat’s PPC budget-management page — the budget features live on inside NinjaCat’s broader marketing-data platform rather than as a dedicated tool.
Is ROASt a direct replacement for Shape?
For the budget-management core, yes: monthly budgets pooled across accounts (Shape’s budgets ≈ ROASt’s portfolios), automated daily pacing, overspend guardrails and alerts. The difference is what sits on top — ROASt also decides where the money should go, using response curves and marginal ROAS rather than pacing rules alone.
Does ROASt do budget pacing like Shape did?
Yes. The engine paces the month, not just the day: it tracks where each portfolio stands against its monthly budget and adjusts daily budgets nightly, within velocity caps. Changes stage before they push, there’s a dry-run mode, and kill switches sit at every level — so it’s automation you can leave running, which is exactly what Shape users are used to.
Which ad platforms does ROASt support?
Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and Meta — with GA4, Shopify and HubSpot as revenue sources, so the engine can optimise against the numbers you actually trust rather than platform-reported conversions.
How much does ROASt cost?
Pricing is public: plans start at £119/$149 per month with a 30-day free trial and no card up front. See the pricing page for the full breakdown.
Can I see how the engine makes decisions before trusting it with budgets?
That’s the whole point of the product. Every recommendation decomposes into the exact factors that produced it, every action is logged, and the engine grades its own predictions against reality every night. Start with how the engine works — or run it in dry-run mode and watch what it would have done.
The pacing you relied on. The engine you didn’t have.
30-day free trial, no card up front — and a seeded demo workspace so you can see the engine’s working before connecting anything.