Comparison

Caeros vs. a Google Sheet for Ad Budgets

By Drew Washington, founder of Caeros. I ran ~$1.7M/yr of ad spend by hand — in a spreadsheet — across seven channels at LTV SaaS Fund before I built this. Last updated August 2026.

Caeros is built for the moment after that line: it paces daily spend, flags a channel drifting over budget while it's still cheap to fix, reconciles month-end in minutes, and keeps an append-only record of every change — for $49/mo flat plus a one-time $25 setup. No percentage of spend, ever.

When is a spreadsheet still the right call?

I'm not going to pretend a spreadsheet is always the problem. It isn't. For years mine wasn't. Keep the sheet if:

• Your budget is small or single-channel. One channel, or a few thousand a month — the cost of a mistake is low and a sheet handles it fine.
• You're a team of one, and staying that way. If nobody else ever needs to operate the budget, the "only one person understands it" risk isn't real for you yet.
• You need total flexibility more than structure. A blank grid does anything. Software has opinions. If your process changes weekly and you like that, a sheet won't fight you.
• Cost has to be zero. A Google Sheet is free. Caeros is $49/mo. If there's no budget for tooling, that's a real and honest reason to wait.

How do you know you've outgrown it?

The tells are specific, and if you own the budget you'll recognize them:

• The "where are we on Meta?" text eats an afternoon of reading tabs.
• Month-end reconciliation is a half-day ritual you rebuild from scratch every time.
• You find overspend after it happened, not while you could still pull it back.
• Nobody else can operate the sheet — so when you take a week off, the budget system goes with you.
• You can't answer "what changed, and why?" from three weeks ago, because the cell just got overwritten.

That last one is the quiet killer. A spreadsheet has no memory. When finance asks why a number moved, "I think I updated it" isn't an answer you want to give.

Google Sheet vs. Caeros: an honest comparison

I've marked the rows where the spreadsheet genuinely wins — because it does, and pretending otherwise would cost me the trust of exactly the skeptical finance reader I'm writing for.

Two rows deserve a note. Cost and setup are real wins for the sheet — free and instant beats $49 and an afternoon, full stop. And the ROAS/attribution row is a "no" I'm proud of: Caeros reads your spend dollars and nothing else. It never needs write-access, never touches your campaigns, and never tracks performance metrics. For a finance buyer, less scope reads as less risk. If you need ROAS and bid management, you want a PPC tool — here's exactly what Caeros does and doesn't do.

Why the "one person understands it" problem matters

Because spreadsheets are quietly error-prone, and the errors hide. Research on operational spreadsheets has repeatedly found that the large majority contain mistakes — one widely cited review of field audits found errors in 88% of the spreadsheets examined; a separate 2015 audit found errors in over 90% of large models. The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group keeps a running list of seven- and eight-figure spreadsheet failures at real companies. None of those teams thought their sheet had a bug either — that's the point.

When a six-figure ad budget runs on one hand-built file with no audit trail, you're not just risking an error. You're risking an error nobody can find, in a system nobody but you can read. That's the fragility I got burned by, and it's the actual thing Caeros replaces.

What Caeros does that a spreadsheet can't

Not "a prettier spreadsheet." Four jobs the sheet was quietly doing by hand, now done by a system that doesn't depend on you being at your desk:

• It paces itself. Holiday- and cadence-aware daily budgets for every channel, recalculated as spend lands — no formulas to maintain.
• It catches overspend early. When a channel drifts over pace, Caeros surfaces a one-click fix while it's still cheap to correct — not at the post-mortem.
• It reconciles for you. Lock the month, compare actuals, recover surplus, reallocate. The half-day exercise becomes minutes, and every change writes a new ledger line.
• It keeps an honest record. The append-only ledger never overwrites. You can always show finance what changed, when, and why.

There's one more thing, and it's the part I'm strictest about: Caeros keeps its own scorecard of what it caught and recovered, in dollars, always against the $49 fee. Some months that's real money. Some months it's $0 — and it shows you that too. I won't put an invented "typical savings" number on this page, because a made-up aggregate is exactly what a finance skeptic smells first. Go look at the real mechanism in the live demo instead.

I lived this exact spreadsheet

For a few years, the entire ad budget at LTV SaaS Fund was mine — about $1.7M a year, across seven channels, three products, two categories — and all of it lived in a Google Sheet I built myself. I paced daily spend off formulas only I understood, rebuilt reconciliation from scratch every month-end, and answered "where do we stand?" a dozen times a week by reading tabs.

It worked. Until I took a week off, and the whole thing stopped — nobody else could operate it. The budget system wasn't a product. It was me.

That was the real problem. Not the spreadsheet — the fragility. A single point of failure sitting on seven figures of spend, looking backward when every decision that mattered was forward, with no memory of what changed or why. Caeros is the tool I wanted the whole time — the whole origin story here.

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