Shape.io is gone. Your pacing workflow doesn’t have to be.
Shape.io was folded into NinjaCat in 2022 — pacing became one feature inside an enterprise reporting contract. Pace is the pacing-first Shape.io alternative: every Shape workflow has a direct equivalent, and most go further.
Every Shape workflow, mapped to its Pace equivalent.
What happened
Shape didn’t shut down.
It just stopped being for you.
Nothing broke overnight. The budget pacing tool your team relied on was absorbed into a platform aimed at a different buyer — and pacing-only teams were left paying enterprise-reporting prices for the one feature they used.
Shape.io becomes the agency default.
One of the first tools built specifically for budget pacing — and the reason many teams finally left their pacing spreadsheets.
NinjaCat acquires Shape.
shape.io starts redirecting to ninjacat.io. Standalone pacing pricing is phased out in favour of bundled contracts.
Pacing becomes a feature, not a product.
Release notes shift to reporting connectors and data unification. The pacing roadmap goes quiet.
Pace picks up where Shape left off.
Pacing-first, priced per ad account, across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft Ads — with the automation Shape never shipped.
Where Budget Pacer went
Every account, on pace — one screen
Shape’s cross-account dashboard, rebuilt for five platforms. Spend, pacing and goals for every client account — and this is the real app below, not a screenshot. Click around.
Beyond CruiseControl
The audit trail Shape never had
CruiseControl adjusted budgets. Pace adjusts them and shows its working. Every change logged with the old value, the new value, and the reasoning — the end of the “why did spend change?” email.
Never in Shape
Shape tracked your accounts. Dot answers for them.
Dot is a senior analyst who sits inside Pace and never clocks off. Ask about any account in plain English and it reads the live data itself — spend against budget, this week against last, campaign by campaign — then comes back with the numbers and what they mean.
- ✓ On call whenever you are — Cmd+I from any page, and it already knows the account you’re looking at.
- ✓ Does the digging itself — 18 specialised tools across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft.
- ✓ Shows its working — every answer opens into the steps it took and the figures behind them.
Head to head
Shape’s features today, next to their Pace equivalents.
Shape’s pacing features live inside NinjaCat now. Here is how they compare to Pace, workflow by workflow — and the full written comparison goes deeper on each row.
| Workflow | NinjaCat (ex-Shape) | Pace |
|---|---|---|
| Auto-pacing | Tracks spend, surfaces alerts | Calculates and applies daily budget changes itself |
| Overspend control | Budget status reporting | Hard limits enforced every 5 minutes |
| Change audit trail | — | Every change logged: timestamp, old → new, reason |
| Anomaly detection | Within reporting views | AI Sparks across all platforms, routed to Slack |
| Ask-your-data AI | AI agents for client questions | Dot — investigates live account data in chat |
| Setup | Full platform onboarding | OAuth connect — pacing live in minutes |
| Pricing | Enterprise contract, reporting bundled | Per ad account · 14-day free trial on Enterprise |
Works with the platforms you already use
Trusted by ad teams across 🇦🇺 🇳🇿 🇳🇱 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇪🇪 🇯🇵 🇦🇪 and beyond
Shape.io questions, answered
The things migrating teams ask before they switch.
NinjaCat acquired Shape.io in 2022. shape.io now redirects to ninjacat.io, and the pacing features live inside NinjaCat’s reporting platform — sold as part of a broader enterprise contract rather than as a standalone pacing tool.
It goes further. Pace recalculates daily budgets multiple times a day, applies the changes itself, and records the old value, new value, and the reason for every change — a full audit trail you can share with clients.
Yes. Paste your existing budget spreadsheet and Pace matches lines to accounts and campaigns in bulk. Forward months schedule ahead automatically, so next month is set before this one ends.
Pace is priced per ad account managed — no bundled reporting suite, no enterprise minimums. Every new workspace starts with a 14-day free trial on the Enterprise plan, on your real client data.
Migrate in an afternoon.
Shape.io teams get priority access off the waitlist — mention Shape when you join.