Sign up, plans and the trial
Create a CookieBeam account, choose between the Free plan and the Starter trial, and see what happens when a trial ends without payment.
A CookieBeam account belongs to a team. Banners, domains, billing and members all live on the team, and the person who signs up becomes its owner.
Create an account
You can start in two ways:
| Start with | How | Card needed | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Choose Start free on the pricing page | No | The Free plan, with no trial |
| Starter trial | Sign up from any other link, or with Google | No | A 14-day trial of the Starter plan |
- Open the sign-up page and enter your email address and a password, or choose Google.
- Check your inbox and open the verification link. The dashboard stays on the verification page until your email address is verified.
- Follow the welcome steps: create your first banner, review your plan, and optionally add a payment method.
If the trial cannot be started during sign-up, your account is still created. A team that has never had a trial gets the trial period when it first subscribes from Billing.
The Starter trial
The trial gives your team the Starter plan for 14 days without a card. Add a payment method before the trial ends to keep the paid plan; you can do it from the welcome steps or from Billing. If you change plan during the trial, the trial end date stays the same.
A team gets one trial. A team that has already used a trial does not get a second one when it subscribes later.
The Free plan
The Free plan is for one site. It covers the core consent banner: a layout preset, colours, a font from the preset list, your logo and button text, one language, automatic script blocking, Google Consent Mode v2, Global Privacy Control handling, and stored consent records.
On the Free plan:
- The Free plan includes one banner, one domain and one team member.
- CookieBeam branding stays on the banner.
- There are no regional rules. The banner uses one opt-in behaviour everywhere.
- Paid features show an upgrade prompt instead of their settings. The server enforces the same limits, so an API call or a queued job cannot use them either.
Consent records have a monthly allowance on the Free plan. When it is used up, the banner keeps working: visitors still see it, their choices still apply, scripts are still blocked, and privacy signals are still honoured. CookieBeam stops storing new consent records until the next monthly reset (UTC) and shows a notice in the dashboard. Upgrading resumes storage straight away. Records that were not stored are not recreated later.
The pricing page lists the current allowances and what each plan adds.
When a trial ends without payment
If the trial ends and no payment method is on file, the team moves to the Free plan. It is not suspended and nothing is deleted.
- One site stays active. By default it is the oldest banner that has been published, or the oldest active banner if none has been published.
- Every other banner and domain is paused. Their settings, history and records are kept.
- CookieBeam emails the owner before the trial ends and again when the team moves to Free, listing the sites affected.
To choose a different active site, open Banners and select Make active on a paused site. The current active site pauses, and the one you chose is restored.
Upgrading to a paid plan restores paused sites up to the number of domains the new plan includes. Sites above that number stay paused until you add domains or activate them yourself.
A paused domain stops storing consent records. A copy of the banner script that was cached or pasted elsewhere can still appear on that domain, so remove the script from sites you no longer cover.
Banners keep the behaviour they had when they were last published until you publish them again. At the next publish, CookieBeam lists the paid settings it will drop. If regional rules are dropped, the banner falls back to opt-in everywhere rather than to a weaker setting.