Squad Autopilot · do it without me
Set it, forget it, and keep your margin. Proper Google Ads, Meta, SEO and content for founders and small businesses, run by a dedicated agent from $500 a month. You set the budget and the goal — then leave it alone for months, or change direction in thirty seconds.
Change log · today
RunningFrom $500/month, no lock-in
You set a spend ceiling it can't cross
Every change logged in plain English
You own the accounts and the billing
Why this exists
A real agency retainer starts around three to five thousand a month, before you've spent a cent reaching anyone. If you're a founder, a start-up or a family business turning over what most Australian small businesses turn over, that's not a marketing budget — that's your marketing budget going to salaries.
So you end up with one of three bad options:
Autopilot is the fourth option. The same execution the big accounts get, run by an agent instead of a team, priced so the majority of your money still reaches the market.
Where the money goes
This is the whole argument. Not that we're cheap — that a much larger share of what you spend actually reaches a customer. Illustrative, using a $2,500 total monthly marketing budget.
Option A · Traditional agency
A real retainer buys you a strategist, a monthly report and someone to call. It also leaves you $500 to actually advertise with, which won't move anything. Excellent service, wrong size business.
Option B · Do it yourself
No fee, full budget, and nobody watching it. Campaigns get set up once and left. The real cost isn't the fee you didn't pay, it's the half of the spend that goes to the wrong searches for eighteen months.
Option C · Squad Autopilot
Four times the working budget of Option A, actively managed every day instead of never. The trade is that you give up the relationship, not the work. If you want the strategist on the account, that's Squad Managed — and it's worth the money, at a bigger budget.
Ad spend is paid by you, direct to Google and Meta. We never touch it.
How it works
Ninety minutes at the start, then it runs. You keep the wheel — you just stop having to hold it.
Ninety minutes, one time, with an actual person. You set your monthly ceiling and what a customer is worth to you. We check your tracking works, write down which claims your business can legitimately make, and agree what the agent may do without asking. Get this right and everything after it runs itself.
Campaigns built, budgets paced, creative written and tested, negative keywords added, landing pages shipped, content published. Daily, not monthly. You get access to your agent to ask for anything, change direction, or interrogate a decision — by chat, or just by replying to its email.
Every change and the reason for it lands in one running log, with a weekly summary email. Read it properly on a Sunday, skim it in three minutes, or leave it for two months and nothing breaks. The control is there when you want it and silent when you don't.
Plans
Talk to your agent as much as you like — conversation is never metered. The plans differ on how much work gets shipped. Every plan includes the full rule set, the spend ceiling, the change log and the service guarantee.
One channel, run properly. For founders and local businesses getting paid media working for the first time.
$500/month
+ $290 one-off setup · from $1,000/mo ad spend
Both paid channels plus content, working against one number. Where most small businesses land.
$1,000/month
+ $290 one-off setup · from $2,500/mo ad spend
Everything at volume, with a new landing page every month. For when the account has outgrown the first two.
$1,500/month
+ $290 one-off setup · from $5,000/mo ad spend
All prices AUD, excluding GST · Direct debit monthly · Cancel any month, no exit fee · Pause for a quiet season, no charge · Ad spend is paid by you, direct to Google and Meta
The humans behind it
Autopilot is not an agent left alone with your credit card. Two senior strategists set the rules it runs inside, and review anything it decides not to do on its own. When something escalates, the answer comes back through your agent — you are never asked to get on a call about it. No humans disappear from the business. They just stop being your problem.
Senior Strategist · Paid media
Sets the guardrails your agent runs inside — the spend ceiling, the target cost per lead, and the bands it may move budget within. Every paid escalation lands on her desk before it goes anywhere near your account.
Senior Strategist · Content & web
Owns your approved claims list and signs off anything the agent won't say on its own — a new factual claim, a comparison, a superlative, anything regulated. He reads the pages before they ship, not after.
Integrations
Your agent works inside your accounts, not a copy of them. You keep the logins, the billing and the data — Squad holds access only. If it's where your marketing already lives, the agent can read it, change it, and write down what it did.
Where the money goes
Where it ships
How it's measured
Plus LinkedIn, Slack, Klaviyo, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign and the rest of the long tail. If it has an API and your marketing touches it, ask at setup and it goes on the list.
What the agent runs
Google and Meta already automate bidding. That's not what you're paying for. You're paying for the work the platforms won't do: the creative, the landing pages, the offer, and the judgement about where the money should go.
01 · Google Ads
Campaign structure, ad copy in your voice, extensions, negative keyword hygiene and budget pacing against the target cost per lead you set at setup. Search terms reviewed daily rather than whenever someone gets to it.
If spend drifts off pace or cost per lead moves outside your agreed band, the agent corrects it and tells you what it did.
Change log · yesterday
02 · Meta Ads
The reason most small Meta accounts stall is creative fatigue, and the reason creative fatigues is that nobody has time to make more. The agent writes and ships new angles continuously, kills what doesn't work, and scales what does.
Audiences, placements and spend paced against the same commercial number as search, so the two channels stop competing for credit.
Change log · this week
03 · SEO + content
Technical fixes, service and location pages, internal linking, schema, and articles that answer what your buyers actually search. Written, reviewed against your claims list, and published on a schedule.
The compounding channel, running underneath the paid channels rather than sold as a separate retainer.
Change log · this month
04 · Landing pages
This is the part no ad management tool can do. If the data says your traffic is fine and your page is the bottleneck, the agent builds a new one — on the same stack Squad ships client sites on.
Most agencies will send you a recommendation about your landing page. This one ships it.
Landing page · last rebuild
Illustrative account activity
The rules
Autopilot is not an agent with your credit card and no supervision. It has an explicit list of what it may do unsupervised, and a hard stop on everything else. You'll get this list in writing before you sign anything.
Immediate · no approval needed
Anything inside the goals, budget and claims you agreed at setup happens straight away and appears in your log.
Held · a human reviews first
These never happen automatically, no matter how confidently the agent thinks it has the right answer.
At setup we write down every factual claim your business is entitled to make, with the evidence behind it. The agent cannot add to that list. Nothing goes live asserting something we haven't verified.
You own your Google Ads and Meta accounts, your card stays on your own billing, and Squad holds access only. We never front, hold or invoice your ad spend — the only thing you pay us is the monthly fee.
Response times
The agent replies to everything immediately — it tells you what it has already done and what it's holding. Where something needs a human behind the scenes, here's what you're actually waiting for.
Pause, resume or shift budget
Acknowledged · Immediately
Resolved · Immediately
New ad creative, approved claims
Acknowledged · Immediately
Resolved · Same day
Spend pacing anomaly
Acknowledged · Immediately
Resolved · Within the hour
New claim needing verification
Acknowledged · Immediately
Resolved · Same business day
New landing page or content piece
Acknowledged · Immediately
Resolved · Within 5 business days
Change of strategy or scope
Acknowledged · Immediately
Resolved · Next business day
Business hours are 9–5 AEST, Monday to Friday. Spend anomalies are watched around the clock.
What we guarantee
When the budget is tight, the thing you actually need protecting against is paying every month for work that never happened. Nobody can honestly guarantee you a number of leads. So we guarantee the things that are in our control — and put your money back if we miss.
If we don't deliver the output your plan specifies in a given month, that month is refunded. Not credited, not made up next month. Refunded.
Every action taken on your account appears in your log with the reason behind it. If it isn't in the log, we didn't do it.
The timings in the table above are commitments, not aspirations. Miss them repeatedly in a month and the same refund applies.
Accounts, campaigns, creative, content and pages are yours and stay in your name. Leave whenever you like and it all keeps running.
Honest fit
We'd rather turn you away now than take four months of fees off a business that was never going to get value from it.
Not sure which side you're on? Compare against Squad Managed →
Autopilot vs Squad Managed
Autopilot is the on-ramp. Start here while the budget is small, move up when the account is big enough that a strategist pays for themselves.
Do it without me
Autopilot
Do it for me
Squad Managed
Monthly fee
$500 – $1,500
Scoped to your account
Built for
Founders and small business
Established accounts at scale
Human contact
Setup session only
Senior strategist on the account
Meetings after setup
None
Weekly or monthly, your call
Reporting
Live change log + weekly email
Weekly commercial reporting, walked through
Strategy changes
Escalated and answered in writing
Owned by your strategist
Regulated industries
Not supported
Supported
Custom commercial modelling
No
Yes
Time to launch
About a week
About four weeks
Pause for a quiet season
Any time, no charge
By arrangement
FAQ
Still not sure it fits?
Tell us your budget and your goal on the setup call. If you're too small for this to work yet, or big enough to get more from Squad Managed, we'll say so.
Book the setup sessionThat's exactly who it's for. Autopilot exists because an agency retainer of three to five thousand a month doesn't make sense on a small budget. If you can put at least $1,000 a month into ad spend and you already have something that sells, you're in the right place.
Any month, no charge and no exit fee. Tell your agent, it pauses the campaigns and stops the billing. When you come back, everything is where you left it — accounts, creative, history and all.
There are humans, you just don't have to manage them. Two senior strategists set the rules your agent runs inside and review anything it escalates. The difference is that the answer comes back through your agent instead of a calendar invite.
Because the ninety minutes at the start is what makes the rest of it run unattended. We need your spend ceiling, what a customer is worth to you, working tracking, and the list of claims your business can legitimately make. Get that wrong and you'd be supervising it forever.
Chat to your agent, or just reply to its email. There's no ticket queue and no form. Conversation is never metered — the plans differ on how much work gets shipped, not on how much you're allowed to talk.
A hard spend ceiling it cannot cross, agreed at setup. Inside that ceiling it can move budget between channels within a band you set. Anything beyond it stops and waits for a human. Every action is written to your log with the reason behind it.
You do, direct to Google and Meta, on your own card. We never front, hold or invoice your ad spend. The only thing you pay Squad is the monthly fee — which is why the money-split above works the way it does.
It can only assert what's on your approved claims list, which we write together at setup with the evidence behind each claim. The agent cannot add to that list. New claims, superlatives, guarantees and comparisons all stop and go to a strategist first.
Nobody can honestly guarantee you a number of leads, so we don't. We guarantee the work: if the output your plan specifies doesn't ship in a given month, that month is refunded outright. And you can leave any month, keeping every account, campaign and page.
Below about $1,000 a month there isn't enough data for daily management to beat leaving it alone, so you'd be paying a fee for judgement the account can't yet use. We'd rather tell you to spend a few months building the budget first.
That's the intended path. Autopilot is the on-ramp; when the account is big enough that a dedicated strategist pays for themselves, moving across keeps your history, creative and campaigns intact.
Move up a plan, or ask your agent — it'll tell you where you are against your monthly allowance before you hit it. Nothing gets silently dropped or silently billed.
Squad Autopilot
Book the setup session and tell us your budget and your goal. If it turns out you're too small for this to work yet, or big enough that you'd get more from Squad Managed, we'll say so rather than sign you up.
