Cookie consent platform pricing: per subpage, per domain, per session or flat

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Per subpage pricing is cheaper for a small site and grows expensive as your URL count rises, whatever your traffic. Flat rate wins as soon as you run several domains. The crossover sits on two numbers about your own estate, your URL count and your monthly sessions, not on the headline price.

What each model is actually charging 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. It is charging for site size, so a catalogue or a deep blog archive costs more than a brochure site with the same traffic. 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.

Put an estate through all four and the ranking moves. A 40,000 URL catalogue with modest traffic is expensive on subpage pricing and cheap on session pricing. A 30 page site with heavy traffic is the exact reverse. Neither of those is a better deal in the abstract; they are different meters reading different things about you.

The two numbers most teams cannot state

Both numbers are harder to get than they look, and both are usually wrong in the same direction, which is the part that costs money.

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. Your sitemap count is a defensible floor; a full crawl is the real number, and it is worth having before you sign anything priced this way.

The session count has a subtler problem: analytics only counts the sessions it is allowed to see. Across Amplio Data client implementations roughly 34% of sessions are hidden by consent by default, a measured range across those implementations rather than a guarantee. So a dashboard reading 100,000 sessions can sit on a real figure meaningfully above that. On a platform priced by session this bites twice. The tier you chose from the dashboard may be too small, and if you then improve your consent rate, the measured number rises and can push you up a tier. We covered where that share of sessions goes in where 34% of your sessions go.

Work out which model is cheapest for you

1. 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. If you cannot crawl it today, count the entries in your sitemap and treat that as a floor rather than an answer.

2. 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.

3. Price every model at those two numbers

   Put both figures through each model in turn. The point of doing all four is that the ranking usually is not the one you expected from the headline prices.

4. 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.

5. 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. A cheaper tier that rescans monthly is a different product on a site that ships pages every week.

Where the bill surprises people

The model you pick decides which kind of growth is expensive for you. Launching a blog archive or a filtered catalogue is a bad month on subpage pricing and free on session pricing. A campaign that goes unexpectedly well is a bad month on session pricing and free on subpage pricing. Opening a second market is a bad month on per domain pricing and nothing at all on flat rate.

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, and it does not vary much by vendor. 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 with a domain cap on the lower tiers, so it is fair to state both. The free tier is €0 for one domain up to 1,500 monthly sessions. Pro starts at €7 a month, scales with your session count from 3,000 sessions upward, and covers up to three domains. The Server plan is priced on request with no session or domain ceiling. The current tiers are on the pricing page.

That mix suits a small busy site and an estate whose page count grows faster than its traffic, because nothing about a larger catalogue moves the bill. It is the wrong meter for a very large site with very heavy traffic, where a flat or negotiated arrangement will beat it, and the three domain ceiling on Pro means an agency or a multi market estate is a Server conversation rather than a list price. That is the honest version, and it is the same arithmetic we just asked you to run.