The LINE friend acquisition cost per add in Japan runs from around ¥8 to around ¥400, and where you land inside that range has very little to do with how well you run the campaign. It is decided by which of the four paid channels your bank balance actually lets you buy. Points campaigns and promotion stickers sit at the cheap end. Friend add ads sit ten to twenty times higher per head. Then a month goes by, a large share of those new friends block the account, and the whole ranking rearranges itself.
What follows is every published figure I could verify for a LINE Official Account, channel by channel, in the currency each one is billed in. Japanese sources are by far the most complete, so Japan gets the deepest table. Taiwan and Thailand follow with what their own market pages state, which is less.
Table of Contents
The four things LINE actually sells you
Friend add ads are the self serve product. Japan calls them CPF ads, Taiwan calls them 加好友廣告, Thailand calls them Gain Friends Ads. You bid, and you are billed only when somebody adds the account. Everything else on this list is a reserved buy arranged through LINE or an agency, with a floor measured in millions of yen, and you commit the money before you know what you get.
Japan publishes hard bid floors for friend add ads, and they change depending on how you choose to be billed.
| Bidding method | Minimum bid |
|---|---|
| Automatic bidding | ¥75 per friend |
| Manual, charged per friend added | ¥50 per friend |
| Manual, charged per 1,000 impressions | ¥200 CPM |
Minimum campaign spend is ¥10,000. That really is the entry price, and it is the reason this channel is the only one most foreign operators will ever touch. The floors are not what you pay, though. Japanese agencies put the working delivered range at ¥200 to ¥400 per friend, with ¥200 quoted as the typical figure for a competently run business account.
What each Japanese channel costs before anybody blocks you
This is the comparison that exists in Japanese and does not exist in English. The figures come from a Japanese agency channel comparison and from published sticker rate cards.
| Channel | Minimum spend | Published cost per add | Typical volume per campaign |
|---|---|---|---|
| Friend add ads (CPF) | ¥10,000 | ¥200 to ¥400 | Scales with budget |
| LINE Points Friends AD | ¥2,000,000 | ¥8 to ¥20 | Around 2,000,000 adds at large scale |
| Promotion sticker (sponsored) | ¥35,000,000 | About ¥18 | Spoken of as around 2,000,000 adds |
| QR poster, add friend URL, LINE Login | Nothing | Nothing | Limited by your own traffic |
One inconsistency is worth flagging, because you will hit it if you read the Japanese sources yourself. The same agency table that quotes about ¥18 per add for a sponsored sticker also estimates 250,000 adds per campaign, and ¥35,000,000 divided by 250,000 is ¥140, nowhere near ¥18. The ¥18 figure only reconciles if the campaign delivers close to two million adds, which is the number a separate Japanese sticker guide uses when describing a single sponsored sticker run. Treat ¥18 as the best case for a very large brand, and treat ¥140 as what happens to a brand nobody wants stickers of.
Now apply the block rate and read the table again
Japanese agencies publish block rates by acquisition channel, and the spread is enormous. Somebody who downloaded a free sticker did not want your brand. They wanted the sticker.
| Channel | Blocked within about a month | Still there | Cost per surviving friend |
|---|---|---|---|
| LINE Points Friends AD | About 70% | 30% | ¥27 to ¥67 |
| Promotion sticker (sponsored) | About 60% | 40% | About ¥45 |
| Friend add ads (CPF) | About 25% | 75% | ¥267 to ¥533 |
The final column is my arithmetic on their published figures, and it moves the ordering at the top of the table. Points campaigns look cheapest before blocks, at ¥8 against the sticker’s ¥18. After a month the sticker at about ¥45 beats the middle of the Points range. So the two cheap channels swap places, and friend add ads remain several times more expensive per surviving head than either of them.
Which settles it. Buy stickers, obviously. Nothing else comes close on the arithmetic, and every Japanese case study you can find agrees.
Except you cannot buy one.
The sticker rate card, and why the arithmetic stops mattering
Promotion stickers are priced for national advertisers. Here is the Japanese rate card, excluding consumption tax, with sticker production billed separately on top.
| Sticker menu | 8 designs | 16 designs | Run length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsored sticker | ¥35,000,000 | ¥40,000,000 | 4 weeks |
| Sponsored mission sticker | ¥40,000,000 | ¥45,000,000 | 4 weeks |
| Sponsored targeting, female | ¥25,000,000 | ¥30,000,000 | 4 weeks |
| Sponsored targeting, male | ¥20,000,000 | ¥25,000,000 | 4 weeks |
| Direct sticker | ¥10,000,000 | ¥15,000,000 | 12 weeks |
| CPD sticker | From ¥6,000,000, billed at ¥60 per download | Up to 4 weeks | |
The CPD sticker is the one that was introduced to bring the floor down, and it is the only sticker menu a mid sized business could plausibly sign off. You set a download target between 100,000 and 300,000 in units of 10,000, and you pay ¥60 per download. So the headline is ¥6,000,000 at the minimum.
The headline is not the invoice. A Japanese agency publishes its own worked quotation for exactly that minimum buy, and the planning and support fee is 20% of media spend on top.
| Line item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Media, 100,000 downloads at ¥60 | ¥6,000,000 |
| Planning and support, 20% of media | ¥1,200,000 |
| Subtotal excluding tax | ¥7,200,000 |
| Including consumption tax | ¥7,920,000 |
| With sticker artwork production added | ¥7,700,000 excluding tax, ¥8,470,000 including |
The same agency’s case study reports about 42,000 new friends from a CPD campaign in roughly six days. If that came from a minimum buy, the cost per add is ¥7,200,000 divided by 42,000, which is about ¥171. Apply the 60% sticker block rate that Japanese agencies quote and you are at roughly ¥428 per surviving friend. That is worse than the middle of the friend add ads range, from a channel that required seven million yen up front rather than ten thousand.
The ¥18 sticker friend is real. It is also only available to companies spending ¥35,000,000 in four weeks. At the price point an ordinary business can reach, the cheap channel is not cheap.
Taiwan prices the same product on a different scale
Taiwan’s numbers are far smaller and the entry barrier is close to nothing.
| Item | Taiwan figure |
|---|---|
| Minimum daily budget | NT$100 |
| Minimum budget for a friend add campaign | NT$500 |
| Market average cost per friend | NT$30 to NT$35 |
| Well optimised accounts | Below NT$20 |
| Range across industries in 2026 | NT$20 to NT$80 |
| Monthly budget agencies recommend for stable learning | NT$15,000 to NT$30,000 |
Industry matters more than anything else. Restaurants and neighbourhood services report NT$15 to NT$35 once a promotional incentive is attached. Financial services and insurance run NT$40 to NT$80, because the decision the ad is asking for is heavier. One Taiwanese travel agency case study settled at NT$25 across a whole account.
Thailand publishes a band and stops there
Thailand is the market with the least public data, and I would rather say that plainly than invent a cost per friend for it. LINE’s own Thai product page states one thing clearly. Gain Friends Ads run on a budget of ฿1,000 to ฿30,000 per month, billed on a cost per friend basis through a bidding system where you set your own price. Targeting goes down to district level by gender, age and interest.
No official Thai cost per friend benchmark is published, so I am not going to quote one. If a Thai agency gives you a CPF forecast, treat it as their estimate rather than LINE’s.
The channels that cost nothing per friend
These belong in the same table as the paid ones, because for most foreign operators running a single brand they will supply the majority of friends in year one. A QR code poster in the shop, the add friend URL on your website, the add friend button in your checkout flow, and LINE Login on your app all cost nothing per acquisition. They also all appear as separate named routes in LINE’s own friend acquisition report, so you can measure them against paid channels directly.
Their ceiling is your existing traffic. That is the honest limitation. If 2,000 people a month walk past the counter, the poster cannot produce more than a fraction of 2,000 friends, no matter how good it is. Paid channels exist to reach people who have never heard of you, and that is the only thing they are worth paying for.
Choosing a channel at your actual budget
- Under ¥1,000,000 a month in Japan. Friend add ads and free routes. Nothing else is purchasable. Budget ¥267 to ¥533 per friend who is still there in a month, and plan your first message sequence before you spend, because the 25% block rate assumes the account does something useful after the add.
- Around ¥7,000,000 to ¥8,500,000 for a one off push in Japan. A CPD sticker becomes possible. Expect an effective cost per surviving friend in the same region as friend add ads, bought as a single burst rather than a tap you can turn off.
- ¥2,000,000 and up, wanting volume fast. LINE Points Friends AD delivers the largest numbers per yen and the worst retention on the list. Worth it for reach into people who have never encountered the brand, provided you accept that seven in ten leave.
- Taiwan at any budget. NT$500 opens a campaign. Start there, watch which industry band you land in, and treat NT$30 to NT$35 as the number to beat.
- Thailand at any budget. ฿1,000 a month opens the product. Build your own CPF benchmark from your own first month, because there is no reliable published one to compare against.
One last thing that applies in all three markets. Every paid channel here requires a verified account, so if the ad menu is greyed out, the problem is your account status rather than your budget.
