What Should a Cookie Banner Cost? An Honest Price Comparison

"For a cookie banner? That much?" — we hear this occasionally, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a sales line. The question is fair: at first glance, a cookie banner shows a window and stores a click. CHF 120 to 240 a year for that? In this post we openly calculate what cookie compliance costs on the market, what free tools deliver — and how an annual fee relates to the risk.

The misconception: a banner is not a banner

Anyone comparing prices first has to clarify what is being compared. Colloquially, "cookie banner" stands for two very different things:

The window. A notice with two buttons. Free plugins can do that, and any franc would be too much for it.

The compliance behind it. For the window to be legally worth anything, more is needed: the website has to know which cookies and services it actually sets (scanner). Non-essential cookies must remain blocked until consent is given. Consent must be recorded verifiably — in a dispute you have to prove who agreed to what and when. The privacy policy must name the services actually in use and stay current when laws or your website change. And since 2024 Google requires Consent Mode V2, otherwise you lose your advertising and analytics data.

The price difference between "free" and "paid" is almost always the difference between these two levels.

What the well-known providers charge

All figures are the providers' list prices, as of August 2026, with annual billing — details change, the orders of magnitude are stable.

Provider	Price per domain	Model	Legal texts included?
Cookiebot (Usercentrics)	approx. EUR 360–1,080/year	by number of subpages	No
CookieYes	approx. USD 100–550/year	by page views and feature tier	No
Borlabs Cookie (WordPress only)	from EUR 29/year	plugin licence	No
OneTrust	on request (enterprise)	individual	No
Aiara Basic	CHF 120/year	flat, no page view limits	Yes, in 4 languages
Aiara Pro	CHF 240/year	flat, no page view limits	Yes, in 4 languages

Three things stand out:

First: the big international providers are more expensive — sometimes considerably. Cookiebot doubled its base prices in summer 2025; a medium-sized website now pays around EUR 360 to 1,080 per year per domain. At CookieYes, merely removing the provider's logo from the banner costs USD 55 per month — more than double an entire Aiara Pro year.

Second: the billing models punish success. Billed by subpages or page views means: if your website grows or a campaign performs well, the invoice grows too — at CookieYes with a surcharge per additional 1,000 page views. Aiara costs a flat rate per domain per year. A viral post changes nothing on your invoice.

Third — and this is the biggest hidden item: the privacy policy is almost never included. Cookiebot and CookieYes deliver a cookie table, but no complete privacy policy and no imprint. You buy those separately — from a text generator for an additional EUR 100 or so per year, or from a lawyer starting at several hundred francs, plus updates. With Aiara, the privacy policy and imprint are included in four languages and grow with you: if the scanner adds a new service, it also appears in the policy.

What about free plugins?

Yes, they exist, and we will not talk them down: for a pure business-card website without statistics, without advertising, without embedded videos, a free banner plugin can be enough — provided someone maintains the legal texts separately.

But that is exactly the point: it depends on which cookies the website actually sets. And hardly anyone knows that by heart. A theme loads Google Fonts, the contact form a spam protection, the web designer added an analytics snippet two years ago, the YouTube video sets cookies before anyone presses play. In this situation a free banner displays something — but it does not know what it should block, it does not prove any consent, and it does not write a privacy policy.

The honest calculation for "free" is therefore: plugin CHF 0, plus your time for the cookie inventory and legal texts, plus maintenance with every change, plus the risk that some of it is left undone. If you value your own hour at just CHF 50, you reach the Aiara annual price after half a working day.

The counter-calculation: what does it cost when things go wrong?

Putting the annual price in perspective requires the other side of the scales. The Swiss Data Protection Act provides for fines of up to CHF 250,000 — directed at the responsible individual, not the company. We have written up how these sanctions really work and whom they hit. If your offering also targets customers in the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation applies on top, with sanctions of up to 20 million euros or 4 percent of turnover.

We deliberately do not argue with fear — the probability that a small Swiss website gets fined tomorrow is low. But the relation is worth knowing: a year of Aiara Pro costs CHF 240. A single hour of legal counsel costs more. A single substantiated dispute about missing consent costs a multiple — even if you win it.

What you actually pay for with Aiara

The annual price is not a price for a window with two buttons. It includes:

• Cookie banner with automatic blocking of non-essential services before consent, accessible per WCAG 2.1 AA
• Cookie scanner that regularly crawls your website and detects new services (Basic: 20 pages, Pro: 600)
• Privacy policy and imprint in German, French, Italian and English — generated from a questionnaire and kept up to date
• Consent log as evidence, stored audit-proof in Switzerland
• Google Consent Mode V2, so advertising and analytics data keep flowing in a consent-compliant way
• Support from Winterthur, from the people who build the product

Basic (CHF 120/year) covers the Swiss Data Protection Act and suits small websites up to 20 pages. Pro (CHF 240/year) additionally includes full international coverage — General Data Protection Regulation including EU representative, the advertising industry's consent framework (IAB TCF), USA, Brazil and South Africa — plus all design and analytics features. The full comparison is on the pricing page.

The conclusion in one sentence

Measured against what a window with two buttons would be worth, every cookie banner is too expensive — measured against what cookie compliance costs on the market, Aiara sits below the big providers, even though the legal texts are already included that elsewhere form the biggest hidden item.