Beta pricing ends May 1st (and what took us so long)

Our prices go up on May 1st. Before we get to the numbers, some context on how we got here and why now.

We started ConsentGuard because of Tagual, our server-side tracking company. Every time we kicked off a tracking project for a client, the first thing we did was audit their existing tracking setup, and consent mode was part of that. After enough audits, the pattern was impossible to ignore: the majority of the sites we looked at had something broken, and the same categories came back over and over.

And the worst part? Some of these problems came back a few weeks after we fixed them, for reasons outside of our control. A developer pushed a theme change. Someone edited a tag in the GTM container. A CMP subscription lapsed and the banner silently stopped loading. A one-off audit solved it on Monday. By Friday it was back. We're just tracking geeks, we don't run ads ourselves, but we recognised pretty quickly that for a PPC agency managing dozens of client sites, this is a structural problem.

So we built ConsentGuard as a monitor: it runs the same check we used to run by hand, on a schedule, and alerts you the moment something breaks. For agencies, it scales across a roster of client sites and catches regressions before they turn up in the end-of-month report.

We thought the solution should be easy. Not "done in a weekend" easy, but easy enough: open the page, click the banner, check what fires before and after. Consent Mode is a documented Google standard. CMPs are documented. How hard could it really be?

However, harder than we expected. A lot of the last six months went into plumbing we didn't know we would need, and that's why we launched at beta prices. Those beta prices end on May 1st. This post explains what changed, what's new, and how to lock in current pricing for the next 2 years if that matters to you.

What we actually had to build

Cookie banners that hide. We assumed CMPs would expose a handful of known selectors. In practice, many setups bury the banner inside a shadow DOM, rename CSS classes at build time, or render it inside an iframe served from a different origin. We now use AI to recognize banners the way a person does, instead of relying on DOM structure. That was not on the original roadmap.

Bot detection. Some production sites sit behind bot protection, and the Pareto principle applies here: roughly 20% of websites cause 80% of the reliability problems. We ended up routing through rotating residential proxies and varying fingerprints to handle them, so that what ConsentGuard sees matches what your users actually see.

The vendor long tail. Google Ads, Google Analytics, Facebook, TikTok, Microsoft UET. Each one emits (and consumes) consent a different way. Google uses the gcs and gcd parameters. The wider ad ecosystem uses IAB TCF strings, which we shipped support for earlier this month. Each CMP (CookieBot, OneTrust, Didomi, Sourcepoint, CookieYes, Cookie-Script, Complianz, Termly, and the custom ones) handles things a little differently.

False positives that matter. Early on, we flagged too many things. A request that only loads a tracking library is not tracking you. A lookup without identifiers is not tracking you. We spent real time teaching the validator to tell the difference, because a report full of noise is worse than no report at all.

PII leaks. Some of the most interesting violations we found had nothing to do with Consent Mode. Emails and phone numbers were being sent to ad networks before anyone had a chance to consent at all. We added the CRITICAL_PII_LEAK check on top of the consent logic.

None of that is visible from the pricing page. But it is why, six months in, the system does far more than the weekend project we originally scoped, and why the infrastructure behind each check costs real money to run.

Coming up: server-side tracking and Google Tag Gateway

A growing share of tracking is now served through your own domain rather than directly from Google, Facebook, or TikTok. Server-side GTM containers, Tagual, and Google's newer Tag Gateway (often deployed via Cloudflare) all fall into this bucket, and the network signatures look nothing like the usual vendor endpoints, so a naive validator misses them entirely.

We're working to get ConsentGuard live with validation for these flows: detecting the first-party tag, recognising the underlying vendor behind it, and checking that the consent signals the client passes to your server match what the CMP is broadcasting. We can't see what happens inside your server (no external validator can), but the handoff from the browser to your server is where the visible breakage tends to happen. It's the next thing on the list, and we expect to ship it while we're still in beta.

What changes on May 1st

Starter stays where it is. Professional and Agency move up.

Lock in current pricing for 2 years

If you subscribe to Professional or Agency before May 1st, your price stays at the current level for the next 2 years, even if we raise prices again.

The same applies to everyone already on a paid plan. If you are already a Professional or Agency customer, nothing changes for you until at least May 2028. You do not need to do anything.

Why 2 years

Because pricing certainty matters when you are adding a tool to a budget you own, or justifying it to a finance team. Two years covers one full budget cycle and the next one, so nobody has to re-argue the line item mid-year.

What's next

We're still in beta. The label comes off once we have shipped server-side tracking support, closed a few more edge cases, and added a few more vendors. The honest story of the last six months is that we built what the real web required, and the new pricing reflects that.

If you have been on the fence, start a free trial and add your client URLs to the dashboard. It takes about 5 minutes, and we don't need access to your Google Ads account or to your Google Tag Manager. If pricing matters to the decision, the next two weeks are the cheapest it will ever be.

If you have already used your trial and need more time to evaluate, or have any other question about the pricing change, get in touch and we'll sort it out.

— Mihai

Cofounder, ConsentGuard.io