Stape or Google Cloud?

Two ways to host a server-side Tag Manager container: Stape's managed hosting, or Cloud Run in your own Google Cloud account. What each costs at a small business's traffic, what each leaves to you, where the data sits and how hard it is to switch.

The short answer

For a small business, Stape is usually the better host for a server-side Tag Manager container. It is free up to 10,000 requests a month, then $20 a month for up to 500,000, and Stape keeps the server updated. Your own Google Cloud costs about $45 a month per server by Google's estimate, Google recommends at least two for live traffic, and its recommended route to your own domain is a load balancer, billed on top. Choose Google Cloud when your company already runs it and has someone to look after it. Both can keep the data in the EU.

By Yannis Spanenburg, founder of Proof of Pixel. Facts checked on 7 October 2026.

Side by side

	Stape	Google Cloud
What it is	Managed hosting for your server container, run by Stape on Google Cloud, with an EU option on Scaleway	Cloud Run in a Google Cloud project you own, set up by you and billed to your account
Setup	Create a container, paste the configuration from Tag Manager, add DNS records. About 5 minutes to deploy, 2 to 3 hours to verify the domain	Billing account, project, preview and tagging servers, at least two instances, a route for your domain, then the server URL in Tag Manager
Monthly cost at small-business traffic	Free up to 10,000 requests; Pro $20 up to 500,000; Business $100 up to 5 million	About $45 per server, two recommended: about $90 before logs and domain routing
What you pay for	Incoming requests, script loads such as gtm.js included; outgoing calls are not counted	Server time, busy or idle, plus network traffic, logs and any load balancer
Over the limit	Free stops until you upgrade; Pro pauses at 110% of its limit; an auto-upgrade toggle avoids both	No cap: servers scale up to the maximum you set and the bill follows, so set a billing alert
Your own domain	Subdomain by CNAME or A records, Own CDN so the IP addresses match, or a path on your site through your CDN	A load balancer, Google's recommended route, at $0.025 an hour; Cloud Run's own domain mapping is not recommended for production
EU data location	EU zones in Belgium, Germany and Finland on Google Cloud, or Stape Europe on Scaleway in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy	Any region you choose, such as Belgium (europe-west1); Tag Manager's automatic setup uses Iowa (us-central1)
Who handles the data	Stape, Inc. (Delaware) as processor under its DPA with standard contractual clauses; Stape Europe is registered in Estonia	Your own Google Cloud account, under your own agreement with Google
Updates	Handled by Stape, which says no manual work is needed	You redeploy Google's stable image; Google recommends at least every major version
Logs and monitoring	Request logs kept 3 days on Pro, 10 on Business; alert rules on Business	Metrics built in, alerts you set up; request logs on by default, $0.50 per GiB after 50 GiB a month
Extras	Custom Loader (all plans), Cookie Keeper (Pro and up), multi-zone (Business), Meta CAPI Gateway hosting from $10 a month	None packaged
Moving out	Deploy the container's configuration on the new host and change DNS; Stape's extras stay behind	The same steps; Stape documents the move from Google Cloud

Checked on 7 October 2026 in Google's tag platform documentation, Google Cloud's price lists and documentation, and Stape's price page and help center. Stape prices are in US dollars, as its price page shows them, billed monthly; billed yearly, Pro is $200 and Business $1,000. Google Cloud prices are Tier 1 list prices in US dollars.

Who should pick which

Stape if

You want server-side tracking without running a cloud project
You want a fixed monthly price you can see in advance
Nobody on your team updates servers or reads cloud logs

Google Cloud if

Your company already runs Google Cloud, with someone who looks after it
Your policies say tracking data must run in your own cloud account
You want to set logging, retention and access yourself

Neither yet if

You run Shopify and Meta is the main channel: start with Shopify's own Meta connection
Google Ads is your only ad platform: Google tag gateway may be enough
Nobody will check the tags after the next change to the site

What you are choosing

A server-side Tag Manager container is a small server that receives your website's tracking events and decides what goes on to Google, Meta and others. The tags, triggers and settings live in your Tag Manager account; the host runs the server that carries them out. Google's own introduction says the server runs in your Google Cloud project or in a different environment of your choosing. What a server container adds over browser tags, and over Google's tag gateway, is in our other comparison.

Stape is a company that hosts those containers. Its global hosting runs on Google Cloud; Stape Europe, registered in Estonia, runs on Scaleway, a European cloud provider. The other route is Cloud Run, Google's service for running containers, inside a Google Cloud project you own and pay for. Google publishes the setup guide for that route.

What it costs at a small business's traffic

Stape charges by requests: every hit your server container receives, including script loads such as gtm.js. One event that fires several tags counts once, and the calls the container makes to Google or Meta are not counted. Free covers 10,000 requests a month. Pro is $20 a month, or $200 a year, for up to 500,000. Business is $100 a month, or $1,000 a year, for up to 5 million. One plan covers one container, and one container serves one site. Stape's calculator starts from your monthly GA4 event count, which is the number to look up first.

Google Cloud charges for server time. Google's setup guide puts each server at about $45 a month (one virtual CPU and half a gigabyte of memory, always on) and recommends at least two to reduce the risk of losing data in an outage: about $90 a month before any traffic. Cloud Run's price list agrees: always-on CPU costs $0.000018 per vCPU-second in Tier 1 regions, which include Belgium, or about $47 for a 30-day month, plus memory. The free allowance of 240,000 vCPU-seconds a month covers under three days of one server.

That fixed cost buys a lot of headroom. Google expects two to ten servers to handle 35 to 350 requests a second; Stape's Pro limit of 500,000 requests a month averages about one request every five seconds. On top come logs and, usually, a load balancer for your domain. Request logging is on by default, Google suggests turning it off above about a million requests a month, and Cloud Logging charges $0.50 per GiB after the first 50 GiB per project each month. On list prices, Google Cloud only catches up with Stape's plans at millions of requests a month.

Going over works differently. A Free container on Stape that reaches its limit is disabled until you upgrade, and a Pro container pauses at 110% of its limit with no grace period; a toggle in the account moves you up a plan automatically instead. Google Cloud has no cap: Cloud Run adds servers up to the maximum you set, and the bill follows. Google's tip is to set a billing alert.

Setup and your own domain

On Stape you create a container, paste the configuration string from Tag Manager and add DNS records for a subdomain of your site. Stape says a container takes about five minutes to deploy and the domain usually two to three hours to verify, up to 72 hours with some DNS providers.

On Google Cloud you need a billing account, the right roles, a preview server for Tag Manager's preview mode and a tagging server for live traffic. Tag Manager can create these for you, but Google describes that automatic setup as intended for testing and says live traffic needs an upgrade. Google also says Cloud Run requires some knowledge of Google Cloud, and asks whether you have that in-house or will need to hire someone.

Either way, the server needs your own domain to be worth running. Google's guidance: a tagging server on the default cloud address can only set script cookies, while a subdomain, or a path on your own website (same-origin serving, Google's stated best practice), gets the full durability of cookies set by the server. A path on your site needs a CDN or load balancer that forwards the requests, on either host.

For a subdomain on Cloud Run, Google recommends a load balancer: $0.025 an hour for the forwarding rule, about $18 a month, plus a charge per gigabyte processed. Cloud Run's built-in domain mapping is a preview that Google does not recommend for production. Stape adds a wrinkle of its own: its Cookie Keeper description says Safari shortens cookie lifespans for responses from third-party IP addresses, and its Own CDN option routes the tracking subdomain through your site's DNS provider so the two IP addresses match.

Where the data sits

Both can run the server in the EU; you have to choose it. On Google Cloud you pick the region, and Belgium (europe-west1) is billed at the Tier 1 prices above. Tag Manager's automatic setup creates the server in Iowa (us-central1), and changing the region means creating a new service and deleting the old one.

On Stape you pick a zone when you create the container. Its global hosting has EU zones in Belgium, Germany and Finland on Google Cloud. Stape Europe runs on Scaleway in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy, and says it does not share your users' data with any US companies. The zone cannot be changed later: you create a new container. Stape's data processing agreement names Stape, Inc., registered in Delaware, as processor (the company handling data on your behalf) and uses the EU's standard contractual clauses.

Neither host changes what consent requires. Stape itself says that using Stape Europe alone won't make Google Analytics GDPR compliant, and that you also need to pseudonymise user data before it reaches Google. For clinics, the limits on health data in our Pixel vs Conversions API comparison apply on either host.

Who keeps it running

On Google Cloud, you do. Google's server updates carry security fixes and new features; Google recommends updating at least at every major version, when Tag Manager tells you to, by redeploying the stable image in Cloud Run. Cloud Run shows request counts, response times and the number of servers with no setup, but alerts are yours to configure in Cloud Monitoring. Request logs record every request by default and can get expensive above about a million requests a month, so Google shows how to filter them out.

On Stape, the company says its system handles server updates without manual work. Request logs, which show every incoming and outgoing request, are kept three days on Pro and ten on Business, and Business adds monitoring rules that send alerts when conditions you set are met. Pro includes email and chat support around the clock, with a help desk target of up to three business days.

What Stape sells on top

Custom Loader, on every plan, loads gtm.js and gtag.js through your own domain or path under a changed address, which Stape says makes them harder for ad blockers and tracking prevention to recognise. Cookie Keeper, from Pro, keeps a master cookie on your site and restores chosen marketing cookies from it when they go missing; Stape says cookies that would expire after seven days can keep working up to 13 months. Its Global CDN, free on every container, loads those script files from Cloudflare servers near the visitor, and Business adds multi-zone hosting that sends each request to the nearest server zone.

Stape also hosts Meta's Conversions API Gateway as a separate product, with no server container needed: $10 a month per Pixel, or $100 a year, for up to 10 million events a month, with a seven-day trial. Meta's own options are in our Pixel vs Conversions API comparison. Cloud Run comes with none of these extras, though Google tag gateway serves Google's own tag from your domain without either host. None of them changes what you may collect without consent.

Lock-in, and how to move

Less than it looks. The container lives in your Tag Manager account. Cloud Run starts Google's server with your container's configuration string, and Stape asks for the same string. Moving means deploying that string on the new host, pointing your tracking subdomain's DNS records at it, checking events in preview and turning off the old server so events are not sent twice. Stape documents the move from Google Cloud and describes it as a cutover with little or no downtime.

What stays behind: Stape's extras, such as Custom Loader and Cookie Keeper, and Stape's logs. If your site loads Tag Manager through Stape's loader, that snippet goes back to the standard one. Leaving Google Cloud, shut down the Cloud Run services, or the servers you kept running keep billing.

Our stake

We set up Stape for clients whose tracking needs a server container: for a small business it costs less than Google's recommended setup, and nobody has to look after a cloud project. We have no partner or affiliate link with Stape. Our own site runs no server container: Tag Manager runs in the browser, and a small relay on our own subdomain, a Cloudflare Worker, sends Meta the server copy of each event with the same event ID. We would pick Google Cloud for a client whose company already runs it, with someone who looks after it.

Questions about Stape vs Google Cloud

Is Stape cheaper than Google Cloud?

At a small business's traffic, yes. Stape is free up to 10,000 requests a month and $20 a month up to 500,000. Google estimates about $45 a month per Cloud Run server and recommends two, so about $90, before logs and a load balancer for your domain.

How much does server-side tagging cost?

Hosting runs from free to $20 a month at Stape for up to 500,000 requests, or about $90 a month on Google Cloud with Google's recommended two servers. The bigger cost is setting it up correctly and checking it after every change to the site.

Is Stape free?

Up to 10,000 requests a month, with no credit card. Page views, events and script loads that reach the container all count, so check your monthly GA4 event count first. When a Free container reaches the limit, Stape disables it until you upgrade; the count does not reset the next month.

What counts as a request on Stape?

Every hit your server container receives, including script loads such as gtm.js and gtag.js. One event that fires several tags still counts once, and the container's outgoing calls are not counted. Preview sessions and bots hitting your container's domain can use up requests too.

What happens if I go over my Stape plan?

Free containers are disabled until you upgrade. Pro pauses at 110% of its monthly limit, with no grace period. Business gets a 30-day grace period the first time. An auto-upgrade toggle moves you up a plan instead, and the count resets each billing cycle.

Does Stape run on Google Cloud?

Its global hosting does. Stape Europe, registered in Estonia, runs on Scaleway, a European cloud provider, for businesses that want EU-owned infrastructure.

Can I keep server-side tracking data in the EU?

Yes, on either. On Google Cloud, choose an EU region such as Belgium (europe-west1); Tag Manager's automatic setup uses Iowa. On Stape, choose an EU zone or Stape Europe when you create the container, because the zone cannot be changed afterwards.

Do I need a custom domain for server-side GTM?

Yes, for it to be worth running. Google says a server on the default cloud address can only set script cookies, while a subdomain or a path on your own site gets the full benefit of cookies set by the server. Stape connects a subdomain with DNS records; on Cloud Run, Google recommends a load balancer.

Can I move from Google Cloud to Stape, or back?

Yes. The container stays in Tag Manager: you deploy its configuration string on the new host, point your tracking subdomain's DNS records at it and turn off the old server so events are not sent twice. Stape's own extras, such as Cookie Keeper, do not come with you.

Who updates the tagging server?

On Google Cloud, you: Google recommends redeploying its stable image at least for every major version, when Tag Manager prompts you. On Stape, the company says its system handles updates without manual work.

Can one Stape plan cover several websites?

No. Stape needs one container and one plan per site, though you can keep several containers under one account with the same billing details.

Is there an alternative to Stape and Google Cloud?

Other companies host server containers too; we have not compared them here. Often the better question is whether you need a server container yet: Shopify's own Meta connection, Meta's own Conversions API options or Google tag gateway can be enough when one ad platform matters.