Stape

Stape runs the Google-provided server-side GTM container image for you, replacing the Cloud Run or App Engine deployment Google documents with a managed service priced per request. Under the hood it runs on Google Cloud (Google Kubernetes Engine), with each customer’s sGTM container isolated from the others. Setup is deliberately thin: you create a server container in GTM with a manually configured tagging server, paste the container configuration into Stape, and point a subdomain of your own domain at it so tagging runs first-party.

On top of plain hosting it layers the operational details that make sGTM setups actually work: a custom loader that serves the GTM script from your own domain (available even on the free tier), Cookie Keeper for extending cookie lifetimes server-side (Pro and up; custom cookie configuration on Business), an anonymizer, bot detection, and multi-domain support (up to 20 domains on Business, 50 on Enterprise). Hosting zones span 15+ regions across the US, EU, Asia-Pacific, South America, Australia, Canada, the Middle East, and Japan, which covers most data-residency requirements without extra engineering. Beyond sGTM it hosts adjacent server-side components — Meta’s Conversions API Gateway, TikTok and Snapchat event gateways, and its own Signals Gateway for routing first-party data to multiple destinations.

Architecturally nothing changes about GTM’s model — your tags, clients, and transformations live in the sGTM container and would move unchanged to self-hosted infrastructure. What you are buying is not having to own scaling, TLS, and uptime for a piece of infrastructure that sits in the critical path of every conversion hit.

Implementation notes worth knowing before you commit. Billing is per container, so a multi-site or multi-environment setup multiplies subscriptions rather than sharing one quota. The real gotcha is quota behavior: on the free plan, or on paid plans without auto-upgrade enabled, a container that exceeds its monthly request quota stops serving traffic until the next billing period — silent data loss on your conversion path. Enable auto-upgrade (which bumps you one tier and keeps traffic flowing) or monitor usage. Request logs are also tier-gated: 3-day retention on Pro, 10-day on Business, and export to S3/GCS only from Enterprise, which matters if you debug tagging issues after the fact. HIPAA BAAs, dedicated IPs, and SSO sit on the Custom plan; Stape itself lists ISO, SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, and DORA compliance.

Use it when you want server-side GTM without a cloud engineering owner — typical for agencies and marketing-led teams — or you need regional hosting and first-party loading handled for you. Migration risk is low in both directions since the container config is portable. Look past it when your team is comfortable operating the container on its own cloud at lower marginal cost, your request volume makes per-request pricing worse than flat infrastructure, or your pipeline is not GTM-based in the first place.