“Consent-free analytics” is search copy. Unpacked, people want: measurement without a cookie banner, without a Google Analytics 4 consent mode headache, without a “reject all” that zeros the graphs.
SiteLine can be that for this tracker’s cookies, because there are none. The snippet does not set a first-party analytics cookie. Collect omits credentials. Visitors are a daily hash of truncated IP (IPv4 /24, IPv6 /48) and user agent. Events still go to SiteLine servers operated by Aglet Technologies. Stripe and Cloudflare are subprocessors. Hosting is not an EU-only product.
Consent-free is not “the GDPR does not apply,” “no personal data,” or “skip the privacy policy.” It is not legal advice. Policy: /privacy. Mechanics: /docs/privacy.
Two consents people confuse
Cookie / ePrivacy consent. Prior consent to store or access information on a device, except where strictly necessary for a service the user asked for. Analytics cookies from GA4 are the usual reason a banner exists. Remove the cookie, and that consent request can go away. That is the SiteLine bet. Longer version: Do I need a cookie banner for analytics? and GDPR analytics without a consent banner.
GDPR Article 6 consent. One legal basis among others (contract, legitimate interests, legal obligation…). Cookieless analytics vendors often rely on your legitimate-interests assessment for audience measurement, not on a pre-ticked banner. Some European authorities accept that for truly limited measurement. Some do not. SiteLine will not pick a member state and declare victory.
If your DPO wants Article 6 consent for all analytics regardless of cookies, you can still run SiteLine — you would be collecting a consent signal in your own UI, which this product does not read.
What “free” of consent still requires
A privacy notice that names SiteLine / Aglet Technologies, describes pageviews and events, says there is no analytics cookie, and admits payloads leave the browser. Link to /privacy.
A legal basis you can defend. We describe truncation, daily salts, hostname allowlists, bot filters, and retention (raw events 13 months, daily totals while subscribed + 30-day grace; Search Console while the account exists) so you can write the assessment. We do not write it for you.
Transfer language if you have EEA/UK visitors: events are processed by Aglet; Stripe (payments) and Cloudflare (email, often DNS/TLS) sit in the chain; countries include the United States, the EU, and Australia. EU analytics after Schrems.
Discipline on custom properties. Consent-free cookieless ids do not cancel an email address you stuffed into properties. If you identify users, you are in a different processing category.
The rest of the page. Consent Mode, IAB TCF strings, and CMP blocking exist because of ads. SiteLine does not implement TCF. We are not an advertising vendor. If you need TCF, you are not looking for this tool.
What you lose by not asking for cookie consent
You lose cross-day visitor stitching. The salt rotates daily. “Returning users, last 28 days” in the GA4 sense is not a SiteLine chart. You still get pageviews, paths, referrers, UTMs, country, device class, goals, funnels, live view.
You lose GA4-style user-id unless you send it yourself (please don’t, unless you have a basis).
You may lose some events to ad blockers on the default third-party collect. A first-party proxy you configure (nginx, Caddy, Cloudflare, Vercel; no managed CNAME in v1) helps. It does not create a cookie, and it does not keep data off our servers.
You do not lose Search Console. SiteLine still imports GSC on a read-only Google scope. That dataset is Google’s, with Google’s anonymisation of rare queries.
Pricing, cookies on the app, contact
Starter / Growth / Scale: $4.99 / $19.99 / $99.99 USD per month, 7-day trial. App cookies on siteline.tools: session, CSRF, theme/sidebar only. Support: [email protected].
If you came from a competitor one-pager that said “100% anonymous, no personal data, GDPR compliant,” read Cookieless tracking explained and IP anonymization vs cookieless analytics instead. We would rather lose the keyword than lie.
FAQ
Is consent-free the same as anonymous analytics?
No. Anonymous data in the GDPR sense is data that cannot identify anyone. A daily hash of truncated IP and user agent is a privacy-reducing identifier, not a magic anonymisation function. Cookieless tracking explained.
Can we use SiteLine in a CMP “strictly necessary” category?
Some teams do, some lawyers refuse. SiteLine does not set an analytics cookie; the request still measures audiences. Categorisation is your CMP configuration, not a SiteLine setting. We will not instruct Cookiebot on your behalf.
Does rejecting marketing cookies stop SiteLine?
Not unless you gate the snippet yourself. There is no consent callback in the tracker. If you wrap the script in a CMP “analytics” category, you recreate the consent dependency you were trying to leave. Most people load SiteLine unconditionally and keep the CMP for ads.