A consent management platform costs nothing to a few hundred a month for most sites, and the number that decides where you land is monthly sessions, not features. Free tiers are real and common. Velo's published preview pricing runs from €0 to €899 a month. The larger cost is usually the setup work.
What the market actually charges
Four pricing shapes cover almost everything on the market, and knowing which one a vendor uses tells you more about your eventual bill than any feature table will. Flat subscriptions charge a fixed fee for a defined set of sites, which is easy to budget and unforgiving if you grow. Usage priced plans bill against monthly sessions, tracked users or pageviews, which is one of the two shapes you will meet most often and the one that moves. Per domain pricing charges for each property separately, which is what surprises agencies and anyone running a family of subdomains. Enterprise agreements are quoted rather than published.
Published pricing guides broadly agree on the shape of it, though they differ at the edges and none of them is a quote: a small site can genuinely run on a free tier, a typical small business lands somewhere around 20 to 50 dollars a month, a mid sized company around 100 to 500, and enterprise runs into the thousands. Those are brackets to sanity check a budget against rather than a price, because two companies with identical feature needs and very different traffic will pay very differently on the same plan.
The number your bill is priced on is one most teams cannot state
Ask a team what a CMP will cost and they open the pricing page. Ask how many monthly sessions they have and the room goes quiet, which is a problem, because on a usage priced plan that is the only number that matters.
There is a sharper version of this that we hit repeatedly on real implementations. The obvious move is to read the session count out of analytics and size the plan against it. That number is already consent filtered: if the existing banner is genuinely blocking, the visitors who declined never reached analytics at all, so the figure you are budgeting from is a floor rather than a total. Across Amplio Data client implementations, consent choices hide around 34% of sessions, a measured range across those implementations and not a guarantee. Size a plan on the filtered number and the allowance can be wrong by month two, for a reason that never appears on any pricing page.
Vendors also do not all count a session the same way: some meter sessions, some unique visitors, some banner impressions or requests. Read the definition rather than the number, and check what happens at the edge, whether you are billed for the overage, moved up a tier automatically, or simply warned. The underlying measurement problem is in where 34% of sessions go.
What Velo costs, with the numbers
Since this post is about being able to see the numbers, here are ours. These are the published preview prices on the pricing page and they are illustrative for the preview period rather than a final rate card, so treat them as the current published position.
Free is €0 a month: one domain, up to 3,000 monthly sessions, one user, advanced Consent Mode v2, and one cookie and tracker scan at onboarding. Pro starts at €7 a month and scales with monthly sessions, at €39 around 50,000 sessions, €199 around 250,000, €599 around a million and €899 above that, covering up to three domains and adding banner branding, automated monthly scans, a consent dashboard with full log and CSV export, and email support. Server is quoted on request, for unlimited sessions and domains, team seats and server side tagging scoped as a project.
The thing worth noticing is that advanced Consent Mode v2 is in the free tier. That is deliberate: the consent signal being correct is what decides whether any of this works, and putting it behind a paywall would be selling the banner while withholding the point of it.
The cost that is not on the pricing page
For most teams the subscription is the smaller line. Installing a banner takes an afternoon. Making it correct is the work.
That work is: setting the consent state before any tag initialises rather than after, gating the tags Consent Mode does not speak for, since it governs Google's tags and nothing else, configuring for the regions you actually trade in, and verifying the whole thing on a decline rather than on an accept. That last step is the one that gets skipped, and it is the only one that proves the setup does anything at all.
Whether you do that in house or pay someone, it belongs in the budget next to the subscription. A cheap platform plus nobody to wire it correctly is usually the most expensive option on the table, and it quietly costs you conversions too. If you are new to the category, what a consent management platform actually is covers the ground underneath this.
What to check before you pick a tier
Find your real session number
Take the analytics figure, then treat it as a floor. If the current banner blocks properly, declined visitors are missing from it.
Read how the vendor counts
Sessions, unique visitors, banner impressions and requests are different meters, and produce different bills from identical traffic.
Count your domains the way the plan counts them
Check whether subdomains, staging sites and country variants bill separately. This is where agency estates get caught.
Ask what happens at the allowance
Overage billed, tier moved automatically, or a warning. The answer changes how much headroom to buy up front.
Confirm the consent signal is in the tier you are buying
Advanced Consent Mode v2 decides whether the platform recovers anything. Check it is included rather than an upgrade.
Budget the implementation next to the subscription
The wiring and the verification are the real hours. Decide who is doing them before choosing on monthly price alone.
Velo sets the consent state from one snippet before your tags initialise, on the free tier as much as the paid ones. The mechanism is on the product page.
Common questions
How much does a consent management platform cost?
For most sites, between nothing and a few hundred euros a month. Real free tiers are common and genuinely usable for a single small site. Published pricing guides put a typical small business at roughly 20 to 50 dollars a month and a mid sized company at roughly 100 to 500, with enterprise agreements running into the thousands. Velo's own published preview pricing is Free at 0 euros and Pro from 7 euros a month scaling with sessions. The variable that moves your bill is almost always monthly sessions rather than the feature list.
What makes a consent management platform bill go up?
Three things, in order of how often they catch teams out. Monthly sessions or tracked users, which is the meter nearly every usage priced plan runs on. The number of domains, since many plans count each domain or subdomain separately. And the jump between tiers, which tends to be a step rather than a gentle slope, so crossing an allowance can move the bill more than the extra traffic seems to justify.
Is a free consent management platform good enough?
For a single low traffic site that needs a compliant banner and a correct Consent Mode v2 signal, often yes. Free tiers usually cap monthly sessions and domains, limit branding, and give you one scan rather than scheduled ones. What matters more than the price is whether the free tier sets the consent state before your tags initialise. A cheap banner that grants everything is not a saving.
How do I estimate my monthly sessions before choosing a plan?
Take your analytics session count, then treat it as a floor rather than the answer. If your current banner is blocking properly, the sessions from visitors who declined are already missing from that number, and across Amplio Data client implementations consent choices hide around 34% of sessions, which is a measured range and not a guarantee. Add a margin, and check how the platform counts a session before committing.
What does a consent management platform cost to set up?
The subscription is often the smaller number. Installing a banner is quick. Wiring Consent Mode v2 so the signal is correct before any tag fires, gating the non Google tags Consent Mode does not speak for, and verifying all of it on a decline rather than an accept, is where the real hours go. Budget for that work, because it decides whether the platform does anything at all.