# You Don’t Need a Cloud Service for a Cookie Banner (Do the Math)

> Consent-as-a-service starts free and ends at €20+/month for a dialog box. What GDPR actually requires from a banner, what the cloud adds, and when self-hosted is simply better.

*Source: https://plugins.viglan.com/cookie-banner-without-cloud-service/*

Somewhere along the way, “show a consent dialog and remember the answer” became a SaaS category with per-domain pricing, monthly scans and a JavaScript bundle served from someone else’s CDN. For plenty of sites the cloud tier makes sense. For a typical WordPress site it is usually paying rent on something a small plugin does locally — and the cloud version can be *worse* for the very compliance it sells.

## What the law actually requires of the banner

Strip away the marketing and GDPR/ePrivacy ask the banner layer for five things: prior consent before non-essential cookies (opt-in), granular categories rather than all-or-nothing, an equally easy reject option, the ability to withdraw later, and a record of the choice. Note what is absent from that list: cloud dashboards, monthly cookie scans, consent analytics, a vendor’s logo in your footer.

## What the cloud services actually add

Fairness requires the honest version of their pitch:

- **Automatic cookie scanning** — genuinely useful on large sites where marketing adds tags weekly; mostly noise on a stable WordPress site whose stack changes twice a year.
- **Consent logging at scale** — relevant for enterprises expecting to demonstrate consent records for millions of users; a first-party cookie plus server logs satisfies most SMB scrutiny.
- **Legal-text upkeep across 40 jurisdictions** — valuable if you operate in 40 jurisdictions.
- **IAB TCF support** — actually necessary if you run programmatic advertising. If you don’t know what TCF is, you almost certainly don’t need it.

## Where the cloud version quietly costs you

- **An external request before consent.** The banner script loads from the vendor’s CDN on every first visit — an ironic data flow for a privacy tool, and another third party for your privacy policy.
- **A render-blocking dependency** on someone else’s uptime, in front of every new visitor’s first paint.
- **Per-domain subscription pricing** that turns a solved problem into a permanent line item across your sites.
- **Integration gaps:** many cloud banners never touch the WP Consent API, so your WordPress plugins cannot react to consent even though the banner “works”.

## What a good self-hosted banner must do

The bar is concrete: publish choices to the **WP Consent API** (so compliant plugins react automatically), emit **Google Consent Mode v2** defaults early and updates on choice (so Google tags behave), respect **Global Privacy Control**, offer opt-in/opt-out/geo models, remain keyboard-accessible, and load zero external resources. That is a complete GDPR consent layer for a WordPress site — no invoice attached.

## The honest decision rule

Choose a cloud CMP if you run programmatic ads (TCF), operate at enterprise scale, or need multi-jurisdiction legal maintenance as a service. Otherwise, a self-hosted banner that speaks WP Consent API + Consent Mode v2 does everything the regulator and Google require — faster, cheaper, and with one less data processor to disclose.

*Consent Banner is exactly this: a free, self-contained banner that drives the WP Consent API and Consent Mode v2 with zero external requests. [Get Consent Banner →](https://plugins.viglan.com/plugins/consent-banner-cookie-consent-google-consent-mode/)*