The short answer: a custom AR filter in 2026 costs anywhere from a few hundred euro for a single mechanic effect built by a studio, up to 45,000 dollars and beyond if you go through TikTok’s official Branded Effect programme with media attached. The long answer is more useful, because the gap between those numbers is where most brands either overspend or get scared off entirely.
We build AR filters and WebAR experiences for brands from our studio in Dublin, so we see these budgets from the inside. Here is how the pricing actually breaks down, what moves the number, and how to avoid paying enterprise rates for a job that does not need them.
The two routes to a branded filter, and why the price gap is enormous
Almost all confusion about AR filter pricing comes from mixing up two different things.
Route one: TikTok’s official Branded Effect programme. This is the enterprise product, bought through TikTok’s sales team, usually bundled with paid placement across the platform. Industry pricing guides such as WordStream’s TikTok ads cost breakdown put Branded Effects at roughly 45,000 dollars to start, and a full hashtag challenge with an effect attached at 150,000 dollars or more. You are paying for guaranteed placement in the effects tray, promotional slots and TikTok’s own campaign support. This is the route behind the giant campaigns you read about, like Mucinex’s zombie effect gathering close to 6 billion views in nine days.
Route two: a studio builds your effect and publishes it through Effect House or Lens Studio. TikTok’s Effect House and Snapchat’s Lens Studio are the platforms’ own creation tools, and publishing through them costs nothing. What you pay for is the concept, design, 3D work, build and testing. No media bundle, no enterprise minimum. The effect goes live on your brand account and spreads on its own merits, helped by whatever media you choose to run separately.
Route two is how most brands outside the global top 100 should be doing this, and it is the route the rest of this article prices.
What a custom AR filter costs in 2026
Across the market, budgets cluster into bands driven almost entirely by mechanic complexity. These are the ranges we quote against at TEJ:
Band one: single mechanic effects, roughly €800 to €2,000. A face effect, colour grade, frame or randomizer. One trigger, one payoff, light 3D. These are the fastest builds, typically a week or two. This is where cafés, salons, clubs and local brands should start.
Band two: standard 3D and try on effects, roughly €2,000 to €5,000. Try on effects with multiple looks, gesture triggered transformations, voice triggers, effects with custom 3D assets or branded audio. More design rounds, more testing across devices. Two to four weeks is typical.
Band three: game filters and advanced builds, roughly €5,000 to €12,000. Score mechanics, head or blink controls, multi stage experiences. These take the most engineering and tuning, because a game that is not fun gets closed in three seconds. Our PUMA Rider game filter, controlled by head movement, sits in this band.
WebAR experiences run roughly €4,000 to €20,000 and beyond, and going past band three usually means you have outgrown filters and want a browser build, which we cover further down.
For an external sanity check, UK studio GLOAM publishes its pricing, with branded AR filters starting at 7,500 pounds and advanced WebAR or app based experiences ranging to 25,000 pounds and beyond. Dublin rates are kinder.
The five factors that move your quote
1. Mechanic complexity. The single biggest driver, as the bands above show. A randomizer is days of work. A playable game is weeks.
2. Asset production. If your brand supplies finished 3D models and design assets, the build is cheaper. If the studio is modelling your product, mascot or packaging from scratch, that is real design time and it shows in the quote.
3. Number of platforms. TikTok and Snapchat use different build tools, so a filter on both platforms is close to two builds. Most brands launch on one platform first, learn, then port the winner.
4. Revisions and stakeholders. A filter approved by one marketing manager costs less than one approved by a brand team, a legal team and a global HQ. Every studio prices feedback rounds, whether the line item is visible or not.
5. Campaign support. Launch strategy, creator seeding, paid boosting of videos using the effect. None of this is mandatory, all of it improves results, and it can be a bigger number than the build itself.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
Two honest warnings from inside the industry. First, an effect with zero launch plan can die quietly no matter how good it is. Budget something, even a small amount, for showing the effect to the first thousand people, whether that is creators, staff, in store signage or a boosted post. Second, effects have a shelf life. The strongest ones are tied to a moment, a launch, a fixture, a season, which means the smart money treats filters as campaign assets rather than permanent infrastructure, and it is why we tie every concept we develop to a date in the client’s calendar.
Filter or WebAR: pricing the alternative
If your brief needs data capture, a leaderboard, age gating, or an experience that launches from packaging and print rather than a social app, you are pricing the wrong product. That work belongs in the browser. WebAR builds generally cost more than an equivalent social filter because you are also buying hosting, analytics and full creative control, but they earn it back in first party data and reach beyond any single platform’s audience. Since Meta shut Spark AR in January 2025, WebAR has also become the standard answer for brands that used to run Instagram filters, and it is the only AR route open to alcohol brands facing platform restrictions. We built the Apache Pizza WebAR game and the TG4 browser experience on exactly this logic.
How to budget if you are doing this for the first time
Start with band one. A single mechanic effect tied to a real moment in your calendar will teach you more than any amount of planning, and the learnings transfer directly if you scale up to an interactive effect or game later. Brief one mechanic, supply your own brand assets where you can, launch on one platform, and put a small seeding budget behind it. Then judge it on the metric that fits the mechanic: user videos for a randomizer, dwell time for a try on, tagged challenges for a game.
The brands that waste money on AR are almost never the ones that spent too little. They are the ones that bought a complicated effect with no reason to exist that week.
Frequently asked questions
Is Effect House really free to publish on?
Yes. TikTok’s Effect House and Snapchat’s Lens Studio are free tools, and publishing an approved effect costs nothing. The cost of a custom filter is the studio work: concept, design, 3D, build and testing. The 45,000 dollar figures you see quoted refer to TikTok’s enterprise Branded Effect packages, which bundle paid placement.
How long does a custom AR filter take?
Band one effects are usually live inside one to two weeks. Interactive effects run two to four weeks. Game filters and advanced builds can take three to eight weeks including tuning and platform review. Public studio timelines, like the ones GLOAM publishes, match what we see in practice.
Are AR filters worth it for small businesses?
At band one prices, often yes, provided the effect is tied to a moment people care about. A local café with a clever randomizer during a festival week can outperform a bland effect from a national brand. The waste happens when complexity is bought without a reason.
What happened to Instagram filter pricing?
It disappeared along with the platform. Meta shut Spark AR in January 2025, so there is no longer any such thing as a new Instagram filter to price. Budgets that lived there have moved to TikTok, Snapchat and WebAR.
What we charge at TEJ
Every project is quoted on the mechanic, the assets and the support you need, for the simple reason that those three things are the cost. What we can promise up front: we publish through Effect House and Lens Studio, so you are never paying enterprise media minimums to get a custom effect live, and we will tell you in the first conversation which band your idea sits in, or whether it is really a WebAR brief. We have built AR for Adidas, PUMA, DHL, SuperValu and TG4, and we are happy to share what comparable projects involved.
Send us your idea and we will come back with a straight answer on cost, timeline and whether it is worth building at all. If you are still at the ideas stage, our 2026 guide to TikTok AR filters for brands is a good place to see what these budget bands actually buy.