How Swapfiets should run Meta ads.
A bike on a rolling subscription, so a rider who stays a year is worth far more than month one. The question isn't whether to run Meta, it's which cities and when.
Analysis built with paid.social, the ad-planning tool from Jonas Sluijs, former Meta growth leadPaid social is a strong fit, and the model does the heavy lifting. Swapfiets rents bikes on a rolling monthly subscription, so a rider who stays a year or two is worth far more than the roughly €20 they pay in month one. That recurring revenue funds an acquisition cost most one-off ecom brands could never justify. The constraint isn't whether Meta works, it's spending it in the right cities at the right time.
This is a geo and calendar game. Demand concentrates in student cities and spikes hard at the start of the academic year, so the plan front-loads budget around late August and treats the rest of the year as maintenance. Optimise to the subscription start, keep targeting broad inside the cities that matter, and let the product's real hook, never fixing or worrying about your bike again, carry the creative.
Feed first. On Meta the best targeting now lives inside the creative: connect your product feed and let Advantage+ decide what to show whom. Swapfiets has only a handful of models, so the catalog isn't the prospecting lever it is for a fashion retailer, brand creative leads. Connect the feed anyway and lean on it in retargeting. The two angles below carry the top of the funnel.
How we built this plan
We pulled Swapfiets' live pricing and modelled the economics from public tiers plus bike-subscription benchmarks. Every derived number is an estimate, not Swapfiets' actual data, meant to show how a plan like this comes together and what "good" looks like for a subscription DTC brand.