Pricing: monthly billing versus annual billing
Checked on 8 September 2026. This table covers the three standard paid plans. Stape lists monthly prices and annual prices in USD. Annual monthly equivalents are rounded; the annual total is what you pay. Check taxes and invoice currency in your quote.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual bill | Monthly equivalent, billed annually | Requests per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | $20 | $200 | about $17 | 500,000 |
| Business | $100 | $1,000 | about $83 | 5M |
| Enterprise | $200 | $2,000 | about $167 | 20M |
Free and Custom are excluded from this comparison. Free is for testing; Custom requires a quote. Pro+, Business+ and Enterprise+ are also available. Check these intermediate tiers on the pricing page before moving straight to the next standard plan.
What counts as a request?
Stape counts incoming HTTP requests to the server container, including scripts served through it and Stape Store requests. GA4 events and sessions are therefore different billing measures. Source: request definition
One incoming request may trigger several tags. Forwarding it to Meta or Google does not, by itself, create another incoming request. Account separately for additional calls made by your configuration, then compare your estimate with Stape's usage counter.
Worked example: turn daily usage into a budget
This is a hypothetical calculation, not a client result. You observe 84,000 incoming requests across seven representative days, averaging 12,000 per day. Over a 30-day period that projects to 360,000 requests. Adding a 25% planning reserve gives 450,000.
| Assumption | Projection for 30 days | With a 25% reserve |
|---|---|---|
| 8,000 requests per day | 240,000 | 300,000 |
| 12,000 requests per day | 360,000 | 450,000 |
| 18,000 requests per day | 540,000 | 675,000 |
The middle scenario fits within Pro's limit. The upper scenario needs more capacity. The reserve is an assumption for this example, not a recommendation for every setup. Campaigns, seasonal peaks and new tags change the calculation. Check actual usage throughout your billing period.
What happens at the request limit?
Without auto-upgrade, Pro pauses at 110% of its limit. Stape describes a one-time 30-day grace period for the first overlimit on Business and Enterprise, including their Plus variants. Free stops at its limit without an automatic quota renewal. Auto-upgrade moves you to a more expensive tier. Source: limits and pauses
Decide who monitors usage and warnings, and who can approve a plan change, before launch. A higher tier affects the budget. A paused container also interrupts measurement.
What stape.io takes over
Stape runs the infrastructure for your sGTM container. Tracking work remains: defining events, passing consent, checking data before forwarding it and testing changes. A running server is not proof of a correct conversion.
The plan structure separates sGTM hosting billed per container from gateway products billed separately. Budget multiple containers as individual line items. An account is not limited to one container.
How we scored it
Our editorial scores: EU data sovereignty 4.0 / 5 · Data quality 4.5 / 5 · Value for money 4.5 / 5 · Ease of use 5.0 / 5. The axes follow our catalogue methodology.
For the buying decision, separate hosting features from the quality of your implementation. A custom subdomain or a higher tier cannot replace tests against your measurement blueprint.
What holds up in production
Managed hosting reduces infrastructure work. It helps teams that can maintain tracking but do not want to establish their own hosting operations. Logs and monitoring matter for recurring investigations too. Check the chosen plan's scope against the problems your team actually needs to diagnose.
Limits and additional operating costs
| Cost category | What to budget |
|---|---|
| Hosting | Plan and billing cycle per container, additional products separately |
| Implementation | Event specification, domain, tag migration and acceptance tests |
| Ongoing operations | Consent changes, release QA, debugging and incident ownership |
| Plan changes | Peak traffic, new data sources and deliberate auto-upgrade settings |
Annual billing can reduce the hosting invoice. Those tasks still need an owner. Separate one-off services from monthly costs in the quote and document the assumed data volume.
Stape or Cloud Run: use comparable assumptions
Compare the same period, currency and operating scope. For Cloud Run, include compute, networking, logs, redundancy and staff time. For Stape, add the work that remains with your team to the subscription price.
A useful calculation is hosting + operating hours × internal hourly cost + separately billed products. Show initial implementation separately or explicitly spread it over a chosen period. There is no reliable universal request threshold at which Cloud Run becomes cheaper for every team.
Disclosure
stape.io has been our declared server-side tagging partner since 2024 and is listed as such in our imprint. It is also the tool we build most of our server-side projects on. The partner status gives us access to roadmap calls and occasional promo codes for discovery clients. And money: stape.io pays us back 20 % of the licence fee every month as cashback, so we earn on every stape.io licence that runs through us. Know that before you read the recommendation above.
So the verdict above is not a neutral lab result. It is the assessment of a team that works with the product daily. That cuts both ways: we know the weak spots better than any review portal, and we have an interest in the product looking good. Which is why the limits above are as detailed as the strengths, and why we recommend Cloud Run and self-hosted servers where they fit better.
What to decide it on
| Your requirement | Next step |
|---|---|
| Measured usage fits Pro | Check features and reserve, then choose a billing cycle |
| Usage falls between standard tiers | Compare the Plus variants |
| Multiple containers or gateway products | List individual subscriptions and the total budget |
| Operations must sit in your own cloud account | Assess Cloud Run or your own infrastructure |
| Shopify pixels or consent propagation fail | Investigate implementation before changing hosts |
The Shopify guide covers pixel implementation. The Usercentrics and sGTM guide covers consent propagation. Our Stape integration profile places the product in the wider stack.