Kargo is a programmatic advertising company. Their core business is mobile ads and premium publisher ad placements. In 2021, they acquired StitcherAds for $64 million to add catalog creative capabilities to their media management stack.

That means the catalog creative tool you're evaluating didn't grow up inside Kargo. It was a startup acquisition — bolted onto a platform built for a fundamentally different purpose. Catalog creative competes for priority against everything else.

Marpipe was built from scratch for catalog creative. It's not a bolt-on, an acquisition, or a feature buried inside a media company. Every engineer, every product decision, every roadmap item exists to make your catalog ads better.

Built for it beats bolted on. Every time.

Kargo uses a percentage-of-ad-spend pricing model — the same model media buying platforms use. The more you spend on ads, the more you pay Kargo. This made sense when Kargo was a media management company. But for catalog creative? You're being taxed on your ad budget for access to a design tool.

Your catalog creative cost should be based on what you're creating, not on how much you're spending on media.

Marpipe charges one flat monthly fee. Spend $50K or $5M on ads — your Marpipe cost stays the same. No escalating fees. No annual lock-in. Cancel anytime.

Your creative tool shouldn't profit from your media spend.

Kargo lets you build feed creatives in their platform, but feed management isn't included. Your product data still needs to come from somewhere else — a separate vendor, a separate contract, a separate integration to manage.

And even after you've designed your catalog ads, publishing still happens manually through native ad platforms. You solve the design bottleneck but leave every other bottleneck in place.

Marpipe has feed management built in. Your product data and your creative templates live in the same platform. Design, test, and publish — all without leaving Marpipe. No third-party feed tool. No manual publishing. No gaps between creation and deployment.

A complete platform. Not a partial one.