Cookie consent platform pricing: per subpage, per domain, per session or flat
Per subpage pricing is cheapest for a small site and grows expensive as your URL count rises, whatever your traffic. Flat rate wins once you run several domains. A large site with modest traffic usually does best on a session meter. Your URL count and monthly sessions decide it, not the headline price.
What does each pricing model actually charge for?
The four models are not four ways of saying the same thing. Each one picks a different quantity to meter, and that choice decides which customers it suits.
Per subpage prices on how many URLs a scanner finds on your domain. Per domain charges a fee for each site, which is straightforward for one brand and multiplies quickly across country domains and campaign microsites. Per session or per visitor prices on traffic, so the bill tracks how busy you are rather than how big you are. Flat rate charges once for the account and bundles a set number of domains into every tier.
The cheapest model depends on your estate’s shape.
Session pricing costs most here.
Every metered model bills you twice over.
Compare what the tier gates instead.
Subpage pricing costs most here.
The two numbers most teams cannot state
The URL count is not the page count your content system reports. Scanners crawl what is reachable, so paginated archives, tag and category listings, filtered listing URLs and localised copies all count. The URL count in your XML sitemap is a defensible floor; a full crawl is the real number.
The session count has a subtler problem: analytics only counts the sessions it is allowed to see. When a visitor declines, Google's tags send either nothing or a cookieless ping, depending on whether you run basic or advanced consent mode, as Google's consent mode documentation sets out. How many sessions that hides depends on your region, your audience and your banner design. To size it, compare GA4 sessions with the requests your server or CDN logs for the same pages, or read the consent rate in your CMP. On a platform priced by session this bites twice: the tier you chose from the dashboard may be too small, and a better consent rate later raises the measured number and can push you up a tier. We covered where that share of sessions goes in where the sessions behind your banner go.
Which pricing model is cheapest for my site?
Count your URLs, not your pages
Crawl the domain and take the number a scanner would find, including paginated archives, tag and category pages and localised copies. Failing that, your sitemap count is a floor.
Take your sessions, then correct for what consent hides
Read monthly sessions from analytics and treat the figure as an undercount, because a share of sessions never reaches the dashboard at all. Use the corrected number for pricing, not the raw one, and use your busiest recent month rather than an average.
Price every model at those two numbers
Put both figures through each model in turn. The ranking is rarely the one the headline prices suggest.
Add the domains you will need in twelve months
Count the sites, country domains and microsites you expect to add within a year and run the numbers again with that count. Per domain pricing is where a plausible looking deal turns expensive, and it turns expensive quietly, one site at a time.
Compare what each tier gates, not only what it costs
Scan frequency, domain and language limits, consent log retention, framework support and server side delivery are all commonly tier gated.
How does the same estate price on each model?
Three illustrative estates show how far apart the meters read. They are examples to reason with, not customers, and the ranking is what matters, not any price.
- A brochure site: 30 URLs, one domain, 150,000 monthly sessions. The subpage meter reads almost nothing and the session meter reads high, so subpage or per domain pricing usually comes out cheapest.
- A catalogue: 40,000 URLs once filters and pagination are crawled, one domain, 20,000 monthly sessions. The subpage meter sits at its top tier while the session meter barely moves, so session pricing usually wins.
- An agency or multi market estate: eight domains of about 200 URLs each and modest traffic on each. Per domain pricing bills eight times, so a flat rate tier whose bundle covers eight domains, or a session meter with no domain cap, usually wins. We cover that case in consent for agencies.
What happens when you go over a plan's limit?
Pricing pages rarely lead with this, so ask before you sign. The common answers are a per unit overage charge on top of the plan, an automatic move to the next tier, or a limit that pauses a feature such as scanning until you upgrade.
Ask which month counts as well: a plan judged on one busy month bills a seasonal spike very differently from one judged on an average.
Where the bill surprises people
The larger cost usually sits outside the pricing page altogether. Installing the platform, mapping every third party script to a category and verifying that the gate holds in both directions is the work that decides whether any of this functions. We set the whole cost picture out in how much a consent management platform costs.
What Velo charges, and on what
Velo meters on monthly sessions, and only the free tier has a domain cap. The free tier is €0 for one domain up to 2,500 monthly sessions. Pro starts at €7 a month for 10,000 sessions, scales with your session count, and covers unlimited domains. The current tiers are on the pricing page.
That mix suits an estate whose page count grows faster than its traffic. It is the wrong meter for a very large site with very heavy traffic, where a flat or negotiated arrangement will beat it. Pro has no domain ceiling, so an agency or a multi market estate pays for its traffic, not for its number of sites.
Common questions
What people ask about this topic.
How does cookie consent platform pricing compare, per subpage vs flat?
It depends on how big your site is rather than on the headline price. Per subpage pricing is priced on how many URLs a scanner finds, so it is cheap for a small brochure site and expensive for a large catalogue or a deep blog archive, whatever your traffic. Flat rate pricing charges one fee and usually bundles several domains, so it wins as soon as you run more than one or two sites, and it is poor value for a single small site. Work out your URL count and your monthly sessions first, then price both models at those two numbers.
What are the different cookie consent platform pricing models?
Four are common. Per subpage prices on the number of URLs a scanner finds on your domain. Per domain charges a separate fee for each site. Per session or per visitor prices on traffic. Flat rate charges one fee for the account and bundles a set number of domains into every tier. Each is charging for a different thing, so the same estate can be cheap on one model and expensive on another.
How do I count the subpages a consent platform will bill me for?
Take the URL count rather than the page count in your content system. Scanners crawl what is reachable, which includes paginated archives, tag and category pages, filtered listing URLs and localised copies, so the number is usually well above what a marketing team would call the number of pages. The count in your sitemap is a reasonable floor. A full crawl is the real number, and it is the one worth having before you sign anything priced this way.
Why is my analytics session count wrong for pricing a consent platform?
Because analytics only counts the sessions it is allowed to see. How many sessions consent hides depends on your region, your audience and your banner design, so a dashboard reading, say, 100,000 sessions can sit on a real figure meaningfully higher. To size the gap on your own site, compare GA4 sessions with your server or CDN request logs, or read the consent rate in your CMP. On a platform priced by session that matters twice. The tier you pick from the dashboard may be too small, and improving your consent rate later raises the measured number and can move you up a tier.
Does a cheaper consent platform tier limit the consent signals it sends?
Sometimes, and it is worth checking before price. Tiers are commonly separated by scan frequency, the number of domains and languages, consent log retention, and whether the framework features and server side delivery are included. A tier that is cheaper because it scans monthly instead of daily is a different product on a site that ships pages weekly, so compare what each tier gates as well as what it costs.