Google Tag Manager was released in 2012, and since then, it has made the lives of marketers and web analytics much easier. Before adding in web GTM a new tracking pixel or events, you had to wait days/weeks/months until your request could be processed and pushed out onto the production site.
Though it took some time to learn the concept of the GTM, it became extremely popular. All because of its ability to consolidate tracking pixels and manage tracking infrastructure in one place.
In 2020 Google released the new version of Google Tag Manager – server container. Server GTM is not as popular as a web container yet.
The main obstacles that prevent people from implementing server GTM are:
In this blog post, I want to talk about the price of server Google Tag Manager hosted on Google Cloud. Why stape’s hosting for server GTM is cheaper and how we secure our user’s data.
The bad news is that Google does not yet have an online calculator that estimates prices for you. I suggest using this tool to evaluate the sGTM cost. Here you will need to add values to the fields Hits Per Month, Egress Hit Size in byte, cost per egress GB, Cost per App Engine Instance per month, Minimum Instances, Request per sec per instance and will get an estimated price of Google Cloud’s App Engine for your site.
How to find these values? Let’s take a step back and check Google’s official documentation on what resources App Engine requires.
Google recommends having at least 3 servers in a production environment to reduce the risk of losing data due to a server outage. Each server is an App Engine instance with 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB memory, 10 GB disk in the Flexible environment. In a flexible environment, Google can autoscale from 3 to more servers if they see the need. They expect that 3-6 servers will handle 50-200 requests per second. Each server costs approximately $40 / month, so the production environment’s monthly price would be a minimum of 3*$40=$120.
For websites with higher traffic volume and number of tags, Google Cloud will autoscale to 5-6 servers, leading to $240-$300 a month.
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