Comparing the price of two CMPs is less straightforward than it appears.
One charges per domain, another according to pages or traffic, a third reserves certain features for higher plans and another allows several websites under one licence.
Two monthly prices displayed side by side therefore do not necessarily describe the real project cost.
Per-domain pricing is easy to understand
The most obvious model associates a licence with a domain.
For a company with one website, the calculation is simple.
The situation changes when an organization has several brands, countries, subdomains or separate environments.
For an agency, costs may also increase with every new client.
Check what the provider calls a domain
The word “domain” itself sometimes requires reading the pricing conditions.
Are subdomains included? Do staging domains count? Does having several languages on one domain change anything?
A website network can produce very different bills depending on how the provider defines its billing unit.
This detail becomes particularly important before a multi-site deployment.
Traffic-based pricing follows usage more closely
Other CMPs use pageviews, sessions or other traffic volumes.
This model generally allows a small website to pay less than one receiving millions of visits.
However, it creates a variable expense.
Strong growth, an advertising campaign or a seasonal peak may move the website into another tier without any change to its technical architecture.
Traffic may be more logical than domain count
If a provider consumes more resources when a website receives more visitors, usage-based pricing can make economic sense.
Conversely, charging ten times more simply because an agency uses the same tool on ten small websites does not necessarily represent ten times more technical load.
This is one reason I do not particularly like per-site billing.
The business model directly influences the uses encouraged by the product.
Features can also determine price
Some plans do not only limit domains or traffic.
Higher tiers may unlock customization, TCF, reports, scanning, integrations or various enterprise features.
You therefore need to compare what the project actually requires rather than the first price displayed on the page.
A €10 offer that ultimately requires a €50 plan for one essential feature is not really a €10 offer for that project.
Free can describe two very different models
A free CMP may be a limited SaaS tier intended to introduce a paid service.
It may also be genuine open-source software that can be installed and used independently from the provider.
Both models are perfectly legitimate, but they do not provide the same independence.
tarteaucitron.js is published under the MIT licence and can be used free through self-hosting.
Open source is not cost-free
Licence price is only one part of operating cost.
A self-hosted installation needs to be configured, monitored and updated.
For an organized technical team, this cost may be very low. For an agency with dozens of independent copies, maintenance may become more expensive than a SaaS licence.
I discuss this in my article about open-source and Pro maintenance.
Why tarteaucitron Pro does not charge per website
I have always found per-domain billing inconvenient for agencies and people managing several projects.
tarteaucitron Pro therefore allows one licence to be used on unlimited websites with unlimited traffic.
A new small client website does not require another licence and a pageview spike does not move the account into another plan.
This is a business-model choice as much as a product choice.
A fixed price makes forecasting easier
One advantage of a model without traffic counters is predictability.
The cost does not depend on a successful campaign or an unexpected increase in visits.
This is convenient for an agency including the CMP in its service or an organization with many websites of different sizes.
The value of the model obviously depends on how many websites are actually managed.
A single website has different criteria from an agency
For one website with moderate traffic, a per-domain plan may be perfectly suitable.
An unlimited model becomes much more interesting as the number of websites increases.
This is why describing one CMP as “cheaper” is difficult without defining the scenario.
The cost for an agency with fifty clients cannot be compared in the same way as the cost for a personal blog.
Be careful with comparisons based only on monthly price
A table simply stating “CMP A: €10, CMP B: €20” can be highly misleading.
The number of domains, traffic limits, required features and potentially maintenance costs need to be included.
Commitment periods and renewal behaviour may also matter.
Total cost is more interesting than the most visible number on the pricing page.
Agencies need to think at portfolio scale
An agency should simulate its cost for ten, fifty or one hundred websites rather than one.
It should also consider the time required to create an installation, apply an update and transfer a project.
These repeated operations may cost more than the licence itself.
I discuss these criteria in my article about CMPs for web agencies.
Questions to ask before comparing two prices
- How many domains are included?
- Do subdomains count separately?
- Is there a pageview or traffic limit?
- What happens when the limit is exceeded?
- Are the required features included in this price?
- What would the same tool cost across all websites in two years?
- What maintenance remains the technical team’s responsibility?
The best model mainly depends on project structure
I do not think one pricing model is universally superior.
Traffic-based pricing may make sense for some services. A per-domain licence may be simple for one website. Open source may suit a team wanting to maintain everything itself.
For tarteaucitron, I chose not to make the number of websites or traffic a commercial constraint.
Before choosing a CMP, the important thing is to calculate the cost using the actual architecture rather than the headline price displayed prominently on the pricing page.
