Free GDPR cookie banner for Shopify with no impression caps
“Free plan available” appears on nearly every cookie consent listing in the Shopify App Store. Read the pricing table and most of those free plans are capped at a few thousand pageviews, show the app’s branding, or leave out the one signal Google requires. Here is what free has to mean for a banner to actually keep you compliant.
The checklist a free banner has to pass
No pageview or impression cap. A banner that stops showing when the free quota runs out is a compliance gap on the busiest days of your month.
Accept, reject and granular preferences. GDPR requires reject to be as easy as accept. A free tier that hides reject behind the paid plan is not compliant, it is a trap.
Google Consent Mode v2. Required for Google Ads in the EEA since March 2024. Free tiers that leave this out quietly break your ads.
Shopify Customer Privacy API. The signal Shopify’s own pixels and sales channels obey. Without it, the banner is decoration.
No scare funnel. Some free tiers exist to run a “compliance scan” that always finds problems and sells the upgrade. A free plan should be a product, not a lead form.
Why most free tiers fail it
Impression caps are the usual reason. When an app’s costs scale with your traffic, the free tier has to be small enough to lose money slowly, so it is capped where a real store outgrows it in days. The other reason is strategy: the free tier is deliberately incomplete so the upgrade prompt has something to sell.
A free plan built the other way round
FairConsent renders the banner from a theme app embed, served by Shopify’s CDN, with no call to any server. Because an impression costs nothing, the free plan does not count them. What free includes:
The complete banner: accept all, reject all and granular preferences for analytics, marketing and functional cookies.
Unlimited impressions, on any amount of traffic, forever.
Google Consent Mode v2 defaults set in the page head and updated on choice.
Shopify Customer Privacy API signals, so Shopify’s pixels and channels respect the choice.
Compact mobile layout and a reopen button for changing the choice later.
One language, with the banner text editable in the theme editor.
Pro, at a flat $9 a month, adds geo-targeting so the banner only shows where consent laws require it, automatic translation into every language your store sells in, full styling control, and removal of the small FairConsent credit. Nothing in Pro is needed for compliance on a single-language store; it is there for stores that sell in several markets.
FairConsent — GDPR cookie banner for Shopify
Compliant on the free plan, no impression cap, no scare scan. Installs in two minutes as a theme app embed and removes itself completely on uninstall.
Install free on the Shopify App StoreAlready have a banner and want to know whether it passes the checklist above? The Consent Mode checker reads your storefront and reports what it finds.