How much budget do you need to start running social ads?

Any specific figure someone gives you as "the right budget to start with" should be treated as illustrative, not as a verified market number, because it depends too much on the sector, the audience, and the campaign's goal.

What is a reasonable strategy, regardless of sector: test with a small budget before scaling. The idea isn't to go in with the maximum budget you can afford from day one, it's to validate with a small investment whether the ad, the audience, and the offer work together, and only then increase spend behind what's already proven to work.

Scaling budget on a campaign that hasn't been validated just multiplies spend on something you still don't know works. It's cheaper to discover an angle doesn't work with a small investment than to discover it after putting your full budget behind it.

If you've never run ads before, the first step isn't deciding your total budget. It's deciding how much you're willing to invest in the test phase, before committing to a bigger number.