Why pageview pricing is the wrong model for a cookie banner
Consent tools that charge per pageview make a legal requirement scale with your traffic. A banner costs the same to serve on page one million as on page one. The case for a flat price per site.Most cookie consent tools charge by pageviews: a free tier that runs out at a few thousand visits, then tiers at 25,000, 100,000, 300,000 pageviews a month, with overage fees above. The model treats a legal obligation like a metered utility, which it is not. The banner has to be there for every visitor whether you have had a good month or not, the script is the same 7 KB file every time, and the only thing that grows with traffic is a small log entry per choice. Cookiequiet charges a flat price per website: free for one site, €3 a month or €29 a year for Starter, €9 a month or €99 a year for Pro, with no pageview or banner-view limit on any plan.
What the incumbents charge
Read on their own pricing pages on 20 October 2026:
| Tool | Free | Paid tiers | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| CookieYes | 5,000 pageviews a month, 1 domain | Basic $10 per domain per month (100,000 pageviews); Pro $25 (300,000; geo-targeting starts here); Ultimate $55 (unlimited) | $0.30 per extra 1,000 pageviews |
| Termly | 1 policy, 10,000 banner views a month, quarterly scans | Starter $14 per website per month or $10 billed yearly (50,000 banner views); Pro+ $20 or $15 yearly (unlimited; Consent Mode v2, logo removal and regional rules only here) | Not listed |
| iubenda | See their page | Essentials €5.99 per site per month or €4.99 yearly (25,000 pageviews); Advanced €21.99 or €19.99 (50,000); Ultimate €89.99 or €79.99 (150,000); geo-targeting and all languages from Advanced | €0.05 per extra 1,000 pageviews |
| Cookiequiet | 1 website, every core feature, geo-targeting, log 30 days, monthly scans, a small branding link | Starter €3 per website per month or €29 a year; Pro €9 per website per month or €99 a year; Agency €19 a month or €190 a year per bundle of 10 Pro websites and 5 team seats | None, no limit |
Prices change; the comparison pages for CookieYes, Termly and iubenda are re-checked and dated.
Five reasons the meter is the wrong instrument
1. You cannot turn the banner off at the limit
A metered service degrades gracefully when you stop paying: fewer API calls, slower builds. A consent banner cannot degrade. Pageview 100,001 needs the same Reject all button and the same blocking as pageview 1, or the site is placing cookies without consent, which is the first reason on every regulator's list of fines. A limit on a compliance tool is a limit you are obliged to exceed.
2. Traffic spikes become compliance bills
A product launch, a press mention, a viral post: the month you are most visible is the month the overage fee arrives, at $0.30 or €0.05 per thousand pageviews. A site that normally sits at 80,000 pageviews and has one 400,000 month pays for it, or finds out that its plan stopped covering it. The incentive for the owner is to look at the banner as a cost of traffic rather than as part of the site.
3. The features that compliance requires are gated by traffic tiers
Geo-targeting, which lets you show the consent banner only where it is legally required and an opt-out notice in US states, starts at CookieYes Pro ($25 per domain per month) and at iubenda Advanced. Consent Mode v2 and regional rules are only in Termly's Pro+ at $20 per website per month. These are not luxury features: Consent Mode is what Google asks for from EEA advertisers, and regional rules are how a site with worldwide visitors avoids showing an EU banner to people in Ohio. Pricing them by pageview tier means a small site with international visitors pays the large-site price to be correct.
4. Pageviews measure your business, not the vendor's cost
Serving a 7 KB script from a CDN costs fractions of a cent per thousand views. The configuration is fetched once per visitor per language. The one thing that grows with traffic is the consent log, a few hundred bytes per choice, and most visitors choose once in six months. Pageview tiers price the tool against what you can presumably afford, which is a sales strategy, not a cost structure.
5. The meter needs a meter
To bill by pageviews, the vendor must count your pageviews, which means its script phones home on every page, for everyone, consent or not. That is a data flow a consent tool should not need.
What a flat price gets wrong, honestly
A flat price has its own trade-offs, and we would rather state them than let the comparison look one-sided.
- Cookiequiet is not a Google-certified consent management platform for the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework. Websites that show Google AdSense, Ad Manager or AdMob ads to visitors in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland need a certified CMP for those ads. Everything else (Google Analytics 4, Google Ads conversion tracking, Meta Pixel, embedded videos, chat widgets) works with the Consent Mode v2 integration.
- The Free plan carries a small "Cookie banner by Cookiequiet" link, keeps the consent log 30 days, scans monthly and generates policies in one language. Starter removes the branding, keeps the log 1 year with CSV export, rescans weekly, adds AI brand match, 1 extra domain and policies in every language. Pro adds the AI design agent, custom CSS, a 5-year log and up to 5 extra domains.
- Flat per-website pricing means a company with 40 small sites pays per site. The Agency plan (bundles of 10 Pro websites and 5 team seats, €19 a month per bundle) is the answer for most of those cases; very large portfolios should talk to us.
What we charge for instead
Features that cost us something to build or run and that not every site needs: longer log retention and exports, weekly automatic rescans, AI brand match, which reads your site's colours and fonts and sets the banner to match, the AI design agent, which changes the banner as you chat with it, policies in every language, custom CSS and priority support. The things every site needs to be compliant, the banner itself, the Reject all button, blocking, Consent Mode, geo-targeting, the scanner and a consent log, are in the Free plan with no traffic ceiling. The pricing page lists the plans; paying yearly saves €7 on Starter and €9 on Pro.
The principle
A cookie banner is closer to an SSL certificate than to a SaaS seat. It is a requirement that applies to every page you serve, it does not get more valuable when more people see it, and it should never be the reason a compliant site turns non-compliant on a busy day. Pricing it per website says what it is: part of the site.