Hi @mickdom,
Thank you for taking time to write a review – we always appreciate honest feedback. That being said, we are very sorry to see you give our solution a low 1 star rating based on what seems to be mainly dissatisfaction with our pricing and not the solution itself
Our pricing is based on the costs we incur when we do an in-depth scan of each full website to map all cookies and tracking technology in use. That’s why the bigger the site, the higher the subscription price. When you request a quote from https://www.cookiebot.com/goto/quote-input/ you will get not only a quote but also an attached URL list of all the pages identified by our scanner. Also, if you sign up for a Cookiebot account, you can always check how many subpages our scanner has found on the monthly scans – that is certainly no secret.
There is a clear reason why we do those in-depth scans: Even though many pages may be based on the same theme and have the same plugins, it is still possible that cookies are coming from the content on those pages. Tracking cookies can come from images, embedded videos, audio tags and many more. Many website owners are very surprised to see the number of cookies and trackers in use on their website because they just didn’t realize that they are there.
Our solution – and our reputation, if you will – rests on being reliable in providing the full picture of all cookies and online trackers in place. We would not be able to provide the full picture if we only did a partial scan and the Cookie Declaration as well as the information provided to the user when asked for consent would be incomplete if it did not contain the cookies and trackers from the entire website. This would not only be an issue in terms of GDPR compliance for the website owner but would also be very problematic in terms of providing transparency to the website users.
We understand that it can be frustrating to have to pay for our service if you have a website that generates little or perhaps no income. However, there is no way for us to provide the service for free beyond the free plan for smaller websites that we have. We hope that you will reconsider both your review and your use of Cookiebot – and if not, we hope you will find a good solution for your website.