How much does a cloaker cost — and what the sticker price hides

Prices in this market range from under $70 to almost $1,000 a month. The number on the page is rarely what you end up paying.

Vellar · Blog

What the market actually charges

Campaign protection tools today run from under $70 to nearly $1,000 a month. That tenfold spread is not about quality — it is about billing model. Understanding the model is what keeps the invoice from surprising you.

There are three ways this market charges, and each hides a different cost.

1. High flat price, no volume cap

Adspect works this way: $299, $499 or $999 a month depending on the plan. You pay the same whether you send a thousand visits or a million.

Makes sense when: you already have high, steady volume. Then the cost per visit is low.

Hurts when: you are testing. Paying $299 in a month where you ran three small campaigns is the worst ratio available.

2. Self-hosted licence

Keitaro works this way: you buy the licence and install it on your own server. The licence fee is flat regardless of volume — and that is where the catch lives.

The licence price is not the cost. You still pay for the server, and you have to size memory and processor as traffic grows. All in, a small deployment typically lands between $60 and $180 a month, and climbs with your volume.

Then there is the cost that appears on no invoice: someone has to keep it running. Updates, backups, monitoring, a server that goes down at 3am. If that someone is you, the price includes your time.

Makes sense when: you have technical staff and want full control.

Hurts when: you are the technical team and the media buying team at once.

3. Hosted, with a request quota

This is how Vellar and much of the market work: you pay by volume band. Starter is $67/month with 25,000 requests; Growth is $197 with 100,000. Past the quota, you pay per extra request.

Makes sense when: you want predictability and do not want to run a server.

Watch out for: what counts as a request. A bot visit consumes quota too — which is why a good bot filter saves money, not just protects.

The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet

An honest comparison is not between monthly fees. It is between total costs, and three of them almost never make the sheet:

• The page tool. If the cloaker does not build the page, you pay for a builder separately. That is $30 to $100 a month nobody adds up.
• Your patching time. Keeping two or three tools talking costs hours a month. Multiply by what your hour is worth.
• The lost click. If the page is slow, you lose sales from traffic you already paid for. This is the most expensive cost and the least measured.

How to decide without regretting it

1. Estimate your monthly visit volume, including what is bot today.
2. Divide the monthly fee by that volume: that is your real cost per visit.
3. Add what you pay (or would pay) for a page builder.
4. If self-hosted, add the server and your maintenance time.
5. Compare totals, not price tables.

In most cases we see, people starting out overpay on high flat plans, and people with volume overpay on separate tools. Vellar plans are at vellarfunnels.com, with the editor included in all of them.