Why We Built Off Hours.

I run an Amazon advertising agency. We manage a portfolio of brands across home goods, kitchen, personal care, and a handful of weird categories I will spare you the details on. Our team is small, the buyers are sharp, and the clients expect results. Typical agency setup. Nothing remarkable.

What was remarkable, at least to me, was how much of my agency's software budget was going to tools we barely used.

Here is how I figured that out, and why it made me build a new one.

The audit that started this

About a year ago, I did something I had been avoiding. I sat down and actually looked at what we were paying for in software each month. Not the servers or the Slack or the G Suite bills. The advertising stack specifically. The tools we had bought over the years to make Amazon ads easier to manage.

The number was bigger than I expected. More than that, the shape of what we were paying for was strange.

We had a research suite we used once a quarter. A listing optimization tool we had stopped using two years ago but kept renewing. A PPC automation platform that was taking a percentage of every client's ad spend. A product tracker I could not find a login for. A keyword tool that overlapped almost completely with another keyword tool.

Each of those purchases had made sense at the time. We had a problem, we bought a tool, we solved the problem. But the tools did not disappear when the problem did. They just kept billing.

The thing that really got me, though, was not the waste. It was this: the feature my team actually used the most, every single day, was a piece of functionality we had built ourselves inside our internal dashboard. Dayparting. Scheduling campaigns to run when customers were buying and pause when they were not. That feature was doing more work for our clients than the entire rest of the stack combined.

And nobody was selling it as a standalone product. Every tool in the market bundled dayparting with six other things I did not need, at a price that only made sense if I needed all seven.

So I built it as a standalone product. That is Off Hours.

The case against bundling

Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. The Amazon ad tool industry is built on bundling because bundling is how you get people to pay $400 a month for a $79 feature.

You do not actually need seven tools. You probably do not even need three. What you need is:

• A way to execute dayparting without logging in four times a day
• A way to adjust budgets on a recurring schedule
• A way to handle one-off events like Prime Day without blowing up your regular schedule
• A way to get alerted when something goes wrong

That is it. That is the list. Four things, and the first one does maybe 70 percent of the work.

Every suite on the market gives you those four things, plus twenty you will never open, and charges you accordingly. The pricing model is usually one of two flavors. A flat tier in the $300 to $600 per month range, or a percentage of your ad spend that scales up every time you successfully grow an account.

Neither of those pricing models is designed around the value of the tool. They are designed around the size of your wallet.

The percentage-of-ad-spend scam

Let me be specific about this one, because it is the pricing model I find most indefensible.

A tool that charges you a percentage of your ad spend gets more expensive the more successful you are. You double your ad budget because a campaign is working, and your bill for the automation tool doubles too. Not because the tool is doing twice as much work. It is executing the same rules, running on the same servers, surfacing the same reports. It just costs more because you are spending more.

This is the SaaS equivalent of a real estate agent who takes a percentage of the sale price. The incentives are not aligned with yours. The tool makes more money when you spend more, regardless of whether that spending produces results.

And the justification, every time, is that the tool is "driving" the spend. That the AI bid management is smart enough to have earned a cut of the budget it controls. I have used enough of these tools to know that the AI is rarely smart, frequently over-aggressive, and usually working against the media buyer's actual strategy.

Off Hours is $149 a month per Amazon Ads account. Flat. Whether you spend $500 a month on ads or $500,000. We do not take a cut. We do not scale with your budget. We sell a tool, not a tax.

The case against AI taking over your strategy

The other thing the suites want to sell you is that their AI will make the hard decisions for you. You upload your campaigns, the AI takes over, bids move automatically, and you go back to doing whatever it is you were doing.

I have watched this work out badly in real accounts more times than I can count.

The reason is simple. The AI does not know what your client's goals are. It does not know that this month is a launch month and losses are acceptable. It does not know that the client's CFO just cut the ad budget by 30 percent and the buyer is trying to preserve the most profitable campaigns. It does not know that you are hand-feeding a specific ASIN to support a PR push.

The AI optimizes for what it can see, which is usually last week's ACOS and conversion rate. The buyer optimizes for what the AI cannot see, which is everything else.

Good automation executes decisions the buyer has already made. Bad automation tries to make decisions on the buyer's behalf. The industry has been selling the second thing for years because it is a better sales pitch. "Our AI will run your ads for you" is easier to market than "our tool will execute your schedule reliably."

Off Hours does the second thing. We use AI where it helps, specifically in the rule builder, where you can describe what you want in plain English and the system configures the rule for you. But the AI never moves a bid or pauses a campaign that you did not ask it to. Your strategy stays yours.

Who this is not for

Off Hours is not for everyone, and I want to be honest about that up front.

If you are running a single FBA product with a $300 monthly ad budget, you do not need this. You probably do not need any automation tool. You need to get better at picking keywords and writing listings.

If you are running a massive enterprise program with custom attribution modeling and a data science team, you probably need more than we sell. Pacvue, Perpetua, or a similar enterprise platform will make sense for you.

If you want a tool that will take over your account and run it with minimal input from you, we are the wrong pick. We are explicit that we are the execution layer, not the strategy layer. If you do not have a strategy, a tool is not going to save you.

Where Off Hours fits is the middle. Agencies running 5 to 50 brands. In-house teams at brands spending $5,000 to $500,000 a month on ads. People who already know what their schedule should look like and are tired of logging in four times a day to execute it manually.

If that is you, we built this for you.

What we are deliberately not building

This is maybe the most important thing to say. The temptation, as a SaaS founder, is to keep adding features until your product looks like the suites you were trying to differentiate from. I have watched this happen to dozens of companies. They start as a sharp tool for one job and end as another bundle, because expanding surface area is the easiest path to higher pricing.

I am trying very hard to not do that with Off Hours.

We are not going to build a research tool. There are already great ones. We are not going to build a keyword tracker. Same reason. We are not going to build an AI bid manager that takes over your account. See above.

What we will build, over time, is a better version of the four things we already do. More rule types that handle edge cases. Better event handling for complex launches. Better reporting on what the automation is actually doing. A tighter integration story for agencies managing multiple accounts.

The goal is to be the best execution layer money can buy for a reasonable price, and to stay the best by being the thing we are instead of trying to be everything.

The pricing, stated plainly

$149 per month, per Amazon Ads account. Billed monthly. Cancel anytime.

Agencies managing more than a couple of brands get volume discounts. The details are on the agency page.

The one-sentence version

Off Hours is one tool, done well, for the people who already know what they are doing and just need the execution layer to stop getting in the way.

If you are one of them, I hope you try it.

For a breakdown of where rule-based automation fits into a full PPC strategy, read Amazon PPC automation: what to automate and what to keep manual.

Alicia
Founder, Off Hours