By Andy Gaber, Founder · Published August 24, 2026 · Last updated September 14, 2026
Short version: Northbeam is a marketing-intelligence platform. Its own pricing page lists Starter at $1,500/mo and Professional at $3,500/mo, with Growth and Enterprise quoted custom and Media Mix Modeling+ and Incrementality as optional add-ons (https://www.northbeam.io/pricing, read September 14, 2026). PixelProof is a detect/monitor that watches the Meta Pixel, GTM, and GA4 tags you already have: Monitor-Only $29/mo · Starter $99/mo · Agency $149/mo. They sit at different layers of the same stack. PixelProof does not replace Northbeam's attribution model. Honest PixelProof stack: Monitor-Only $29/mo · Starter $99/mo · Agency $149/mo.
Disclosure: PixelProof is our product, so we are not a neutral reviewer of Northbeam. Every Northbeam figure on this page is taken from Northbeam's own pricing page, read September 14, 2026; nothing here comes from a review site, a practitioner blog, or a forum. Northbeam is a trademark of its owner, used here in nominative fair use. Support: support@pixeluptime.com.
Northbeam says on its own About page that it was founded in 2019. Its product is a marketing-intelligence platform: multi-touch attribution, media mix modeling, and creative analytics. On 7 October 2025 Northbeam published a post announcing its "Clicks + Deterministic Views" model, which attributes revenue to ad views and not only clicks, and describes it on that post as "A revolutionary new viewthrough model." All of the above is Northbeam's own published wording on northbeam.io, read September 14, 2026. An earlier revision of this page attributed a superlative to Northbeam that does not appear anywhere on northbeam.io. It has been removed: we will not put a word in a competitor's mouth, including a flattering one.
An earlier version of this paragraph also stated a founding city, a job title for Northbeam's co-founder, a cumulative venture-funding total, the size of a 2025 growth round, and an ad-spend floor below which Northbeam was said not to be worth buying. None of those could be verified from Northbeam's own material or from its named investors' own announcements on September 14, 2026, so they were removed rather than hedged. We are not going to publish a number about another company's balance sheet that we cannot source.
| Tier | Price | Fit |
|---|---|---|
| Northbeam Growth | Custom quote | Northbeam's wording: seven-figure brands spending under $200K/month on ads, via an agency partner |
| Northbeam Starter | $1,500 (Northbeam's page shows this figure without a period label; Professional is the tier it marks "/ per month") | Northbeam's wording: brands spending less than $1.5m a year on ads |
| Northbeam Professional | $3,500/mo | Northbeam's wording: spending up to $500k a month on ads |
| Northbeam Enterprise | Custom quote | Northbeam's wording: spending more than $500k a month on ads |
| Media Mix Modeling+ / Incrementality | Listed as optional | Shown as optional add-ons on Northbeam's pricing page |
| PixelProof Monitor-Only | $29/mo or $261/yr | 1 store: weekly Meta + Shopify monitor, email break alerts. No fix snippets. No PDF. Detect and watch — not an attribution model. |
| PixelProof Starter | $99/mo | 3 stores: same detect/monitor job plus paste-ready snippets for detectable storefront findings. Not a Northbeam implementation. |
| PixelProof Agency | $149/mo | 15 stores: Starter job plus PDF reports. Multi-store bill, not a partner program. |
Every Northbeam figure above is read directly from northbeam.io/pricing on September 14, 2026. Every tier on that page carries a "contact us for a quote" call to action, so these are Northbeam's published starting points, not a quoted bill; your price is between you and Northbeam. Prices change without notice — check the link before you rely on this table. PixelProof prices are the live Monitor-Only $29/mo · Starter $99/mo · Agency $149/mo stack from PRICING_TIERS. Monitor-Only is on that grid.
Northbeam is an interpretation layer: it takes event data as input and produces attribution as output. PixelProof is a monitoring layer: it takes public storefront HTML as input and produces alerts when storefront-visible loaders stop looking present. Interpretation on top of broken input is worse than no interpretation at all, because it produces a confident-looking wrong answer instead of an obvious gap. PixelProof does not grade Northbeam's homework and does not produce a competing ROAS number.
If the buyer's job title is Head of Performance or VP Growth at a brand spending well into six figures a month on paid media, and the question is "where should next quarter's budget go across ten channels," Northbeam is in the correct category and PixelProof is not a substitute for it. The deterministic-views work is real engineering that a detect/monitor at Monitor-Only $29/mo · Starter $99/mo · Agency $149/mo does not attempt to replicate. Northbeam's own pricing page maps its plans to ad-spend bands, so the honest way to size the fit is to read those bands on their page and compare them to your own spend. We removed a previous claim that Northbeam is not worth buying below a stated ad-spend threshold: that was sourced to third-party blogs, not to Northbeam, and we will not publish someone else's buy/don't-buy verdict on a competitor as if it were a fact.
If the question is "is the Meta Pixel and CAPI-related storefront loader my downstream stack depends on still looking present," PixelProof is the right layer and Northbeam is not a substitute. This is especially true around Shopify's Aug 26, 2026 checkout upgrade, which strips Additional Scripts and legacy checkout.liquid tracking from every non-Plus store automatically. A brand paying Northbeam's published $3,500/mo Professional rate on top of a missing storefront pixel is paying for expensive false confidence. Monitor-Only at $29/mo is that watch: recurring storefront scans and email break alerts. Paste-ready fix snippets are Starter+ ($99/mo and $149/mo) for detectable storefront findings — not bundled into Monitor-Only, and not a substitute for Northbeam's MTA/MMM stack. If the question is "is my existing tracking still looking present," not "where should the budget go," the cheaper, narrower tool is the right one.
How the scan works — public HTML only, no checkout X-ray, no Ads Manager login — lives on the methodology page. Limits, trial, and refunds are on the FAQ.
Until September 14, 2026 this section carried a list of Northbeam's weaknesses: reviewer scores, a quality comparison against another named vendor, and a reliability criticism. Every item came from third-party review blogs and social posts, not from Northbeam. We took the whole section down rather than rewriting it more carefully, because a competitor publishing unverifiable quality judgements about a named rival is not a comparison, it is a liability. The Northbeam facts that remain on this page are the ones on Northbeam's own pages, with the link and the date next to them. If you want criticism of Northbeam, read reviews written by people who are not selling against them.
This is a hypothetical scenario, not a real customer case. Imagine a $10M/yr DTC brand paying Northbeam's published $3,500/mo Professional rate to route budget across Meta, Google, and TikTok. In September 2026 a Shopify theme update following the Aug 26 checkout upgrade quietly strips a storefront data attribute Northbeam's pixel depends on. Northbeam sees Meta-attributed volume fall and its model dutifully shifts budget toward Google, which appears to be over-performing by comparison. The brand loses two weeks of Meta budget optimization based on a data failure rather than a real performance change. A Monitor-Only $29/mo watch layered on top, purpose-built to catch storefront-visible breakage against Shopify's Web Pixels API and Meta's Pixel documentation, would have flagged a loader/signature change the same cycle. That is not a claim we saw the AddToCart event volume drop, ingested Northbeam's stream, or recovered ROAS. If you also want paste-ready guidance for a detectable storefront finding, that is Starter or Agency — not Monitor-Only, and not Northbeam's attribution desk.
Northbeam is the party interpreting the event stream, which makes it the wrong party to audit its own input quality — the incentive gradient does not point that way. That is a structural argument about where an audit should sit, not a claim about how well Northbeam does its job. PixelProof does not produce a competing ROAS number and has no allocation opinion to defend, which is the whole point: an alarm system that has no stake in the outcome is easier to trust than a dashboard that grades its own homework. That is still detect/monitor, not a clearance, compliance certification, or guaranteed recovery of ad spend.
Northbeam's lowest published fixed price is the $1,500/mo Starter tier, before optional add-ons (September 14, 2026); PixelProof's whole bill is Monitor-Only $29/mo · Starter $99/mo · Agency $149/mo. A merchant comparing sticker prices without noticing that one product allocates spend and the other watches storefront loaders is comparing two different kinds of numbers. Monitor-Only does not include the snippet library. Annual billing is 25% off (Monitor-Only $261/yr, Starter $891/yr, Agency $1341/yr). Live Stripe checkout is on /meta-monitor/pricing, including a Monitor-Only deep link at /meta-monitor/pricing?checkout=monitor_only&utm_source=site&utm_medium=shared&utm_campaign=pp_monitor&utm_content=monitor_checkout_shared.
The free storefront scan is a soft paywall, not a brick wall. This browser gets 3 free scans, plus 2 more if you leave an email, then a ~24-hour cooldown. When the budget is used we ask you to start Monitor-Only or come back later. We do not hard-lock the product, invent remaining seats, or call the next scan "premium locked." If localStorage is missing (private mode), the gate fails open so you can still scan. The standalone free-scan page also uses a short-lived session cookie (one scan per hour) as a separate abuse control — still not a paywall brick. Checkout attaches a 7-day trial on paid plans, including Monitor-Only. Cancel before day 8 and you should not be charged — see Account → Subscription.
PixelProof is a compliance monitoring service, not a certification or legal advice service. Monitoring cannot guarantee 100% detection of every pixel breakage or Meta API deprecation. Merchants remain responsible for their own tracking compliance.
Northbeam describes itself on northbeam.io as a marketing-intelligence platform for multi-touch attribution (MTA), media mix modeling, and creative analytics. Its own blog post dated 7 October 2025 announces a "Clicks + Deterministic Views" model connecting ad views, not just clicks, to revenue, and describes it as "A revolutionary new viewthrough model." That is Northbeam's own wording on its own blog, checked September 14, 2026. We make no claim about whether the model is a first of any kind. It is an attribution stack, not a pixel-health monitor.
Northbeam publishes its tiers at https://www.northbeam.io/pricing. Read September 14, 2026, that page lists four plans: Growth (custom, positioned for brands spending under $200K/month on ads, sold through an agency partner), Starter at $1,500/mo (for brands spending less than $1.5m a year on ads), Professional at $3,500/mo (up to $500k a month on ads), and Enterprise (custom, more than $500k a month). Media Mix Modeling+ and Incrementality are listed as optional add-ons. Every plan's call to action is "contact us for a quote," so treat the listed numbers as Northbeam's published starting points rather than a final bill. PixelProof is the honest stack Monitor-Only $29/mo · Starter $99/mo · Agency $149/mo — a detect/monitor on the storefront tags you already have, not Northbeam's attribution model.
No. Northbeam tells you where to allocate spend across channels; PixelProof watches whether the storefront-visible Meta Pixel, GTM, and GA4 tags that feed any allocation decision still look present on the public HTML. That is detect/monitor, not a claim that Northbeam's models stay clean or that raw event data is "trustworthy." Northbeam's own models can degrade silently when the underlying pixel or CAPI-related loaders stop looking present — and Northbeam does not alert you when that happens. Monitor-Only at $29/mo is watch-and-alert only. Paste-ready fix snippets ship on Starter ($99/mo) and Agency ($149/mo) for detectable storefront findings — not on Monitor-Only, and not as Northbeam's attribution layer.
No. PixelProof does not produce multi-touch attribution, marketing-mix models, creative analytics, or a competing ROAS number. It does not run identity resolution or a "Clicks + Deterministic Views" model. Plenty of brands run both: Northbeam interprets the event stream; PixelProof watches whether the storefront-side tags that feed it still look present after a theme, consent, or campaign change.
No. Monitor-Only ($29/mo or $261/yr) has no fix snippets and no PDF reports — weekly storefront watch and email break alerts only. Paste-ready snippets for detectable storefront findings ship on Starter ($99/mo, 3 stores) and Agency ($149/mo, 15 stores). You or your developer paste and verify. Snippets are not a concrete fix path we run on your theme, not a magic auto-install, and not coverage for checkout surfaces the storefront scan cannot see. Monitor-Only is not a fix-pack.
Yes, and for a brand paying Northbeam's published $3,500/mo Professional rate it is a cheap hedge on the input layer — not a substitute for the attribution layer. A week of silent storefront-pixel breakage can poison the numbers Northbeam produces for that week; a Monitor-Only watch on the public HTML catches a loader/signature change the same cycle. That is not a guaranteed ROAS recovery and not a claim we see Northbeam's event stream or Shopify order-level truth.
This page used to answer that with reviewer scores and complaint themes taken from third-party blogs. We could not verify any of it from Northbeam's own material, so we removed it on September 14, 2026 rather than restate it more softly. We are Northbeam's competitor on an adjacent layer; we are not a neutral reviewer of their product, and we are not going to publish a quality judgement about them that we cannot source. If you want reviews, read them yourself and weigh who wrote them.
Because Northbeam observes what the pixel sends it — a pipeline that quietly starts sending fewer or malformed events looks, to Northbeam, like a channel simply performing worse. The model has no independent way to know its input broke. PixelProof does not ingest Northbeam's event stream or cross-reference Shopify order truth. It is a separate storefront-presence check: when a public-HTML loader stops looking present, you get an alert. That is detect/monitor, not an attribution audit.
No. PixelProof uses a soft paywall: this browser gets a small number of free scans (3, plus 2 more if you leave an email), then a nudge toward Monitor-Only at $29/mo. After about 24 hours the free budget can reset. If localStorage is unavailable (private mode, blocked storage), the gate fails open — we do not brick the scanner. The /meta-monitor/free-scan landing also rate-limits to one scan per hour per session cookie. None of that is fake scarcity, a remaining-seat countdown, or a “locked premium” wall.
Email support@pixeluptime.com. That is the only PixelProof support inbox. There is no in-app chat team and no Shopify App Store review thread. We are a small company: expect a human reply, not a 24/7 SLA.
PixelProof is not affiliated with Meta, Google, or Shopify.
Questions: support@pixeluptime.com · FAQ · Privacy · Terms. Soft limit on free scans — not a hard lock. Detect and monitor; not a fix-pack on Monitor-Only.