If you are pricing a server-side tracking setup, Stape is usually the first quote you get. It hosts server-side Google Tag Manager, and its entry price is low enough that it looks like an easy yes.
Plan prices are the simple part. How Stape counts requests decides your actual bill, and that number is reliably higher than the event count most teams budget against.
All figures below were checked on stape.io/price in August 2026. Pricing changes, so verify before you commit.
Stape pricing plans in 2026
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Included requests/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | - | 10K |
| Pro | $17 | $200 | 500K |
| Business | $83 | $1,000 | 5M |
| Enterprise | $167 | $2,000 | 20M |
| Custom | Contact sales | - | Unlimited |
Annual billing takes 20% off. The free plan needs no credit card, which makes it genuinely useful for validating a proof of concept before you spend anything.
Feature access is tiered, not just volume. Business and above adds multi-zone infrastructure, the Enricher power-up, 10 days of logs, Cookie Keeper, monitoring, File Proxy, and multi-domain mapping. Domain limits scale with the tier: up to 20 domains on Business, up to 50 on Enterprise, by arrangement above that.
What actually counts as a request
Stape's own pricing FAQ defines a request as every incoming hit your server GTM container receives, and says explicitly that this "includes tracking hits and also script loads like gtm.js, gtag.js, analytics.js."
Two consequences follow.
Script loads burn quota. Every page that loads your GTM script through the Stape container consumes a request before a single conversion event fires. On a content-heavy site with a low conversion rate, script loads can be the majority of your request count.
Fan-out is free. Outgoing calls from the container are not counted. One incoming purchase event delivered onward to Meta CAPI, GA4, and TikTok is still one request. This is genuinely good pricing design, and it is the opposite of how per-destination billing works elsewhere.
Stape also notes that "preview or debug sessions can generate extra hits, and bots or crawlers hitting your container domain can be counted too." If you are running an agency and spending real time in preview mode across client containers, that consumption is real. Bot traffic against your container domain is not something you control, and it counts.
Your GA4 event count is not your request count
The most common budgeting mistake is reading "5M requests" as "5M GA4 events" and sizing the plan from a GA4 report.
Those numbers do not match. Requests include script loads, preview sessions, and bot hits. GA4 events do not. The gap between them depends on your traffic shape, and on a high-pageview, low-event site it can be large.
Stape clearly knows this, because their pricing page ships a calculator that asks for page views and other events separately rather than taking one combined number. Use it. Sizing a plan off a GA4 event count is how teams end up upgrading a month after signing up.
The costs that are easy to miss
One container equals one site. Stape's FAQ is direct: you cannot use one subscription for multiple containers. Each container needs its own plan. You can hold several subscriptions under one account with shared billing, but that is an administrative convenience, not a discount.
This is the single biggest budget surprise for multi-brand businesses. Five storefronts on Business is five times $83, not $83. If you run several regional domains under separate containers, model that before comparing headline prices against a competitor that bills one account across sites.
Feature access is gated by volume tier. If you need Cookie Keeper or multi-zone routing but only send 400K requests, you are on Business at $83 for the features, not Pro at $17 for the volume. Check the feature table against your requirements before sizing on volume alone.
Downgrades need support. Upgrading is a toggle in the account. Downgrading requires contacting the support team. Worth knowing if your traffic is seasonal.
What Stape's price does not include
Stape hosts and manages your server-side GTM container, plus related gateways. That is the product, and it does it well.
It is not an analytics product. There is no reporting interface, no mobile measurement, no attribution modelling, and no data governance layer. Those come from whatever you send the data to, and they carry their own costs.
So the comparison to run is "Stape plus your analytics tool plus your mobile measurement partner" against whatever else you are considering. On a hosting-only basis Stape is inexpensive. On a whole-stack basis, add up everything first.
Stape versus building it yourself on Google Cloud
Stape publishes its own cost breakdown for the DIY route. These are the vendor's numbers on the alternative to its own product, so treat them as motivated, but they are easy enough to check.
By their numbers, a minimum production Cloud Run setup is about $40 per server per month across at least three servers, so roughly $120/month before anything else. Scale to five or six auto-scaled servers and it becomes $240 to $300. Logging, if you leave it on, runs around $100 per 500,000 requests.
Against that, Business at $83/month for 5M requests is cheaper, and the cloud bill still excludes the engineering time to build, monitor, and maintain the thing. For most teams the managed route wins on cost before you even value the time.
Build it yourself for control rather than price: a custom architecture, specific residency requirements, or data that cannot sit on shared infrastructure.
When Stape is the right call
Stape is the right answer when you want a hosted sGTM container and the gateways around it, you already have analytics and attribution handled elsewhere, and you are running one site or a small number of them. For that job it is mature, well documented, cheap, and the free tier lets you prove it out at zero cost.
If that describes you, the rest of this page is not going to change your mind, and it should not.
Where teams outgrow it
Three patterns come up repeatedly.
Multi-site businesses. The one-container-one-site rule turns a cheap tool into a per-brand line item. At five or ten containers, the arithmetic stops favouring the low headline price.
Teams stitching a stack together. Hosting from one vendor, analytics from another, mobile from a third, governance from nowhere in particular. Each piece is reasonable. The total is not, and neither is the integration work between them.
Anyone who needs mobile. Stape is a web-side product. If iOS and Android measurement matters, that is a separate vendor and a separate bill.
Stape alternatives worth pricing
Addingwell. The closest like-for-like alternative, European, with a pricing model that bills overage per 100K requests instead of pushing you to the next tier. Plans start at €90/month for 1M requests, with a free tier up to 100K. Container and domain add-ons are priced separately. See Addingwell pricing for the full breakdown.
Google Cloud, self-managed. Full control, meaningful engineering cost. See the figures above.
Hardal. A different shape rather than a cheaper Stape. Hardal covers the same server-side hosting layer, then adds web and mobile analytics, marketing attribution, ETL and data governance, and unlimited server-to-server destinations in one product. Managed hosting runs in the US, UK, EU, EMEA and Asia, close to your users for latency or in a specific country for residency, and it can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure. Plans start at $249/month for 5M events.
That is more than Stape's $83, and the comparison is not like for like in either direction. Stape's 5M is requests, including script loads. Hardal's 5M is events. And Hardal's price covers the analytics and attribution layer that Stape expects you to buy elsewhere. If you only want a hosted container, Stape is cheaper and simpler, and you should use it. If you are currently paying for hosting plus an analytics tool plus a mobile measurement partner, compare the totals.
Full feature-by-feature breakdown: Hardal vs Stape. Current Hardal pricing: usehardal.com/pricing.
For a consent-aware managed collection model, see the JENTIS pricing guide.
The short version
Stape's list price is low and its request model is fair, particularly the decision not to charge for fan-out to multiple destinations.
Two things decide whether the headline price holds. Size your plan on requests rather than GA4 events, using their calculator rather than a GA4 report. And count your containers, because one subscription covers one site.
Get those right and Stape is priced honestly for what it does. What it does is hosting, so price the rest of the stack separately.
Running server-side tracking across several brands, or across web and mobile together? See how Hardal handles it →