We Built a Foreplay & AdSpy Alternative So Our Clients Could Win

Every brand worth beating is running ads right now. The hard part was never finding them — it was understanding them.

We run an agency. For years we paid for the big ad-spy tools — Foreplay, AdSpy, all of them — to see what our clients’ competitors were putting in market. They’re genuinely good at one thing: showing you a wall of other people’s ads.

But a wall of screenshots doesn’t tell you why an ad works. It doesn’t hand you the hook, the angle, the offer, or whether the thing is actually winning or just quietly burning someone’s budget. So our team did that part by hand. Every campaign. Every client. Hours of it.

Eventually we got sick of it and built our own. It’s called socialfuel.io, and it does the part the swipe-file tools skip: it decodes the strategy. Paste any brand, and 90 seconds later you’ve got their live ads and the playbook behind them.

Here’s exactly how it works — and yes, the screenshots below are our tool reading the ad libraries of the very tools it replaces.

What socialfuel.io actually does

Drop in any brand. socialfuel.io pulls their live ads from across Meta, Instagram and Google, then uses AI to break down the strategy behind them — the hooks, the angles, the offers, and which creatives are actually pulling weight. You get a scored, structured playbook you can take straight into your own campaigns.

Competitor research that used to eat an afternoon now takes about 90 seconds. Five steps, start to finish.

Step 1 — Create your free account

No credit card, no sales call, no “book a demo” wall. Sign up with Google, Facebook or an email and you’re in. You can audit your first ad free.

Step 2 — Your command centre

The dashboard is where you live. Every brand you’re watching sits front and centre, with a running count of how many new ads each one has launched since you last looked. No more checking the Meta Ad Library by hand — if a competitor moves, you see it here.

Step 3 — Pull up any brand’s entire ad library

Type a brand name or paste a Facebook or Instagram URL, and socialfuel.io surfaces every ad they’re running — across Meta and Google — in one wall. (Here it is pulling all 131 live ads from Foreplay’s own account. We appreciate the irony.)

Filter by platform, by newest, by longest-running. The ads that have been live the longest are usually the ones making money — that’s where you look first.

Step 4 — Decode the strategy, not just the creative

This is the part no other ad tool does. They all show you the ad. socialfuel.io tells you why it works — and whether it’ll scale.

Hit Decode on any ad and you don’t get a vibe. You get a full teardown.

A weighted Creative Score — not a gut-feel star rating. It grades the ad across eight weighted dimensions and rolls them into one number out of 100. In the shot below, that live Gymshark sports-bra ad scores 36/100 — “Mediocre.” The breakdown it shows you:

• Hook Power — 4/15
• Copy Persuasion — 4/15
• Emotional Impact — 5/10
• CTA Effectiveness — 3/10
• Offer Clarity — 7/10
• Audience Targeting — 6/10
• Format Optimisation — 5/10
• Shareability — 2/15

Look at the weighting. Hook, Copy and Shareability are scored out of 15, not 10 — because those are the levers that actually move performance. You see exactly where the ad is strong (Offer Clarity, 7) and where it’s bleeding out (Hook 4, Shareability 2).

Then it says it straight, in plain English. No jargon, no hedging: “behaves like an old-school catalog insert rather than a high-performance paid social asset… falls short of DTC athleticwear campaigns that hook users with split-screen bounce tests, material close-ups, and UGC testimonials about peeling off a sweaty sports bra.” It even calls the ceiling — Scale Potential 4/10: “lacks the direct-response mechanisms needed to scale beyond a warm remarketing audience.”

And it maps the entire play. Scroll-Stop score. Funnel stage (Cold Prospecting · Solution Aware). Creative pattern (lifestyle_aspirational). The exact audience the brand is chasing — “women 18–34, gym-goers and runners already active on social.” Then five deep-dive tabs — Overview, Hook & Copy, Visual, Psych, Strategy — for when you want to go all the way down.

That’s over twenty data points on a single ad, in about ten seconds. But here’s where it stops being an analysis tool and becomes a production line.

Every decode ships with a ready-to-run Designer Brief. The analysis, reverse-engineered into a creative you can actually make. For that Gymshark ad, it hands you:

• 3 concept variants to test — Problem-Agitation, Social Proof / Real-World Performance, and Direct Feature-Benefit Breakdown.
• A strategic recap — persona, desired emotional state, tone (“direct, functional, high-energy, expert-led”), the winning pattern (“UGC-style real-world stress test + explicit engineering proof-points”), and the exact pain points to hit.
• A production spec your designer or editor executes without a two-hour briefing meeting.

You just went from “here’s a competitor’s ad” to “here’s the brief for three better ones” — without opening a Google Doc.

Then take it anywhere.

• Download Ad Report — a clean PDF of the full decode. Drop it in a client deck, a pitch, or your own swipe file.
• Share Ad — one link that opens the whole breakdown: score, verdict, brief and all. No login, no export dance.

That’s the difference. Other tools give you a screenshot to screenshot. socialfuel.io gives you a scored teardown, the strategy behind it, and the brief to beat it — in one click.

Step 5 — Save it, build your playbook

Found a winner? Save it. Every saved ad keeps its full snapshot — and any analysis you’ve run — so revisiting it never costs you another credit. When you’re ready to brief a designer, a client or yourself, hit Download Ad Report and walk away with the whole breakdown as a clean export.

SOCIALFUEL.io vs Foreplay vs AdSpy

We’re not here to trash the other tools — they’re solid swipe files, and we used them for years. We just needed the layer they don’t have: the decoded strategy, across both Meta and Google, without a paywall on the front door.

Why we built it (and why you can use it)

socialfuel.io started as our internal weapon — the thing that let a lean team out-research agencies three times our size. We weren’t planning to sell it. But every client we showed it to asked the same question: “Can I just use that myself?”

So now you can. The same ad intelligence we run for the brands we work with, opened up for any operator who’d rather decode what’s working than guess at it.

Spy on your competitors properly. Build from what’s proven. Stop funding ads that were never going to convert.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free Foreplay alternative?

Yes. socialfuel.io is free to start — you can search brands and audit your first ad without a credit card. Foreplay runs on a paid trial; socialfuel.io lets you get value before you ever pay.

What’s the best AdSpy alternative?

If you only want a giant searchable database of Meta ads, AdSpy does that. If you want to understand the strategy behind the ads — scored, decoded and across Google too — that’s exactly what we built socialfuel.io to do.

Does it work for Google ads, not just Facebook?

Yes. socialfuel.io pulls Meta, Instagram and Google ads in a single search, so you see a brand’s whole paid footprint, not just their social creative.

Do I need to be a marketer to use it?

No. The decode is written in plain English — what the ad is doing, who it’s for, and whether it’ll scale. If you can paste a brand name, you can run it.

Decode your first competitor in seconds— free

Pick the brand that’s beating you. Paste it in. See their whole strategy on one page in 90 seconds.