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No fee inside your budget

Semicola takes 0% of media. It charges for intelligent work in Intelligence Units, billed separately (see Billing). So the budget you set is the budget that buys media: there’s no fee carved out of it and no gross/net split to read. Delivered spend on every buyer surface is the spend the seller reported.

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The budget ceiling

Media buys allocate against the campaign’s budget.total. Campaign reads carry both numbers, so read them rather than re-deriving them:
  • allocatedBudget: the sum of the budgets of every media buy that still counts toward the plan: DRAFT, PENDING_APPROVAL, INPUT_REQUIRED, ACTIVE, PAUSED and COMPLETED. A draft buy holds budget exactly as a live one does.
  • unallocatedBudget: budget.total − allocatedBudget, the room left for a new buy or an increase. It can go negative; an over-allocated campaign is a launch blocker (see Campaign readiness).
When you raise an existing buy, its current budget is already inside allocatedBudget. The most it can go to is its current budget plus unallocatedBudget; adding the current budget again counts it twice. Staging a proposal with no room left fails with 409 INSUFFICIENT_MEDIA_BUDGET (“No unallocated budget left on … Raise the budget or remove a staged buy.”). When a seller already has a draft buy on the campaign, its budget counts as available to that seller’s next proposal.

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How a budget splits across products

A staged buy splits its budget across the proposal’s products by their allocation percentages. Shares are exact to the cent: any leftover cents go to the products with the largest remainders, so the packages always add up to the buy. With pacing periods, each product’s share splits again by period.

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Currency

A campaign has one currency, set when it’s created. An update that sends a different budget.currency fails with CURRENCY_MISMATCH (“This campaign buys in USD.”). Every product in a staged buy must be priced in the campaign currency.
  • A product priced in another currency is skipped when you stage the proposal, with the reason “Priced in EUR; the campaign settles in USD.” The result lists skipped products in productsSkipped.
  • If no product in the proposal is priced in the campaign currency, staging fails (“None of this proposal’s products can be staged.”).
On the seller side, a storefront confirms the currency it quotes and settles in (Confirm your currency, currency_confirmed, a go-live blocker) and may list additional settlement currencies (paymentCurrencies). Payout currency (settlement_currency_match) checks that the default currency is one of them. Nothing assumes USD: a storefront with no confirmed currency can’t go live.

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Not available yet

  • Cross-currency buying. There’s no FX conversion: a buyer can’t buy a product priced in a currency other than the campaign’s, and there are no FX rates to lock.
  • Per-source execution currency for ad-server sources.
  • Fee terms and budget_breakdown (media_budget, fee_amount, effective_gross_cpm). With no media fee there’s nothing to break down.
  • Lowering budget.total below what’s already allocated isn’t refused; the campaign shows as over-allocated (OVER_ALLOCATED, “Staged buys exceed the budget by …”) and can’t launch until you rebalance.