Guide
Written to be useful whichever vendor you end up picking. Feature lists mostly converge; these seven questions are where they actually diverge.
Ask these before the demo, not after the contract.
Where is the data stored, and who can subpoena it?
Get the actual country, not "the cloud". A US-headquartered vendor answers to US law even when its servers sit in an EU data centre, because the CLOUD Act reaches the company, not the building. If this matters to your DPO or an enterprise customer's security review, get the country and the vendor's own legal entity in writing rather than a reassurance in a sales call.
Do you actually need a consent banner?
No vendor can answer this for you, and one that claims its script removes the need for a banner is wrong. ePrivacy Article 5(3) covers storing or accessing information on a device, cookies included but not limited to them, and the answer depends on your configuration, your legal basis and your national regulator, not on which company built the tracker. A cookieless tool changes the size of the question. It does not remove it. Ask your counsel, and be wary of anyone who tells you not to.
Does the vendor sample your data?
Sampling tends to show up quietly: a report that times out on a busy day and returns an estimate instead, or a row cap you only discover once you cross it. Ask directly at what volume sampling starts, and whether the product tells you when a number on screen is sampled or just shows a number and lets you assume it is exact.
How does the price actually grow with volume?
Event-based pricing scales with your product's success, which is fine until a good week turns into an invoice nobody budgeted for. Ask what happens at the limit: does collection stop, does it bill per event with no ceiling, or does it charge in fixed packs you can predict without a calculator. Ask separately whether bot traffic is filtered before it is billed. A tool with no incentive to filter it well usually doesn't.
Do you need product analytics, or just page views?
Traffic, sources and a goal counter answer "how many people visited, and from where". Funnels, retention cohorts and segmentation answer "where do they drop off, and do they come back". The second set is a materially larger engineering problem and the price reflects it. Paying for product-analytics depth on a five-page brochure site is wasted spend. Buying a pageview counter for a product with a signup flow leaves the actual question unanswered.
Can you get your data out, and what does leaving cost?
Ask specifically whether you can export raw events, not just report totals, and on which plan that export lives. A CSV of one dashboard is not your event history, and "contact us for an export" after you have already left is not an export policy. A vendor confident in its product has no reason to make leaving expensive.
Is self-hosting on the table?
For most buyers it isn't a requirement. For a subset it's the only thing that satisfies their obligations: no third party ever holds the data, full stop. If that's you, ask plainly rather than assuming a hosted EU vendor is close enough. Hosted-in-the-EU and self-hosted are different promises, and not every privacy-positioned vendor offers the second one. Metricward, as of today, doesn't.
No vendor, including us, scores well on every axis above. A five-page marketing site does not need product-analytics depth, and a fifty-person SaaS company does not need to agonise over whether a script tag is 3KB or 5KB. Rank the seven questions by what actually matters for your situation, then judge vendors against that ranking rather than against each other in the abstract.
If you want the specific, checkable answers for us: security and privacy cover questions 1 and 2 in full, and pricing covers 4 and 6.