Trustpilot badge for your website: what it costs, the free plan limits and the alternatives

A Trustpilot badge is the smallest thing Trustpilot will put on your site: your TrustScore, a row of stars and a review count, in a strip narrow enough to sit in a header or beside a checkout button. It is also the piece most people assume comes free with a Trustpilot profile, and that assumption is where the budgeting goes wrong. Here is what the badge costs in September 2026, what a free Trustpilot account really includes, and when a badge from a different source is the better buy.

What a Trustpilot badge actually is

Trustpilot calls its widgets TrustBoxes, and the badge is the compact end of that family. Functionally there are two things people mean by it. The first is a score badge: your TrustScore out of 5, the stars, the total number of reviews, and Trustpilot's own logo. The second is a review count strip, which drops the visual weight further and is designed to sit inline in a navigation bar or above a form.

Both render inside an iframe served by Trustpilot. That single detail decides most of what follows. The reviews stay Trustpilot's, the typography stays Trustpilot's, and the badge cannot inherit your color tokens or your border radius. It also means the review text is not part of your page as far as a search engine is concerned, so a badge contributes nothing to what Google reads on that URL. What it does contribute is a second-long reassurance to a human who is hovering over a button, which is a real and separate job.

What a Trustpilot badge costs

Trustpilot does not sell the badge on its own. It sells plans, and widgets are counted rather than named. These figures come from Trustpilot's plans page, checked on 3 September 2026.

Three things in that table cost people money they did not plan for. Every paid price is per domain, so a main site and a regional store are two subscriptions rather than one. Every paid plan is billed annually on a 12 month commitment, so the $99 is really $1,188 signed up front. And Starter is offered only to new small business customers with revenue up to $5 million, which means the genuinely cheap entry point is closed to a good share of the companies that go looking for it. The full breakdown sits on our Trustpilot pricing page.

There is one more wrinkle worth knowing before you sign anything. Trustpilot's plan cards say 2, 10, 21 and 22 widgets, while Trustpilot's own feature comparison table shows 1, 9, 11 and 11 for the row labelled TrustBox widgets to showcase trust. Those two published numbers disagree, and neither of them names an individual badge. If a specific TrustBox is the reason you are buying, get sales to confirm that exact widget in writing before you commit to a year.

What you get on a free Trustpilot account

More than the marketing suggests, and less than you need. A free account lets you claim your profile, reply to reviews, send 50 invitations a month and run a widget. For a small business whose entire reputation lives on Trustpilot and who wants one badge on one page, that is a workable setup and it costs nothing.

It stops working the moment you want a second placement. A badge in the header and a review carousel on the homepage is two widgets, and a reviews page makes three. Invitation volume is the other wall: 50 a month is roughly two a day, which a business doing any real volume burns through in a week. Most people who end up paying Trustpilot are not paying for the badge. They are paying because they outgrew the invitation cap and the badge came along with it.

Trustpilot badge vs a Google review badge vs an aggregated badge

The badge question is really a source question. Whichever platform you pick, that platform's badge shows only its own reviews, so the choice is about where your proof actually is.

That third row surprises people. If your reviews are on a Google Business Profile rather than in an online store, Google gives you no badge at all, which is why the Google review badge question has such a messy set of search results: half the articles are describing a Merchant Center product that most of the readers cannot use.

The aggregated route is worth considering for a reason that has nothing to do with price. If you have 4.7 across 60 reviews on Trustpilot and 4.9 across 180 on Google, a Trustpilot badge is quietly showing a visitor your weaker number and a quarter of your evidence. Pooling them is both the better figure and the more honest one.

Where to put a trust badge so it changes anything

Placement decides whether a badge is worth its subscription. It works by answering doubt at the exact moment doubt appears, which means it belongs next to the thing a visitor is hesitating over: the signup button, the pricing table, the quote form, the checkout. In those positions a score and a review count remove a reason to leave and check your listing in another tab.

A badge in the footer is seen only by people who already scrolled past every decision on the page. It is not harmful, it is just not doing anything. The pattern that works on most sites is one small badge sitewide near the primary call to action, and one fuller review layout, a review carousel or a wall of cards, on the pages that actually sell.

Watch what the badge costs you in page weight while you are at it. It is the smallest element on the page and should be the cheapest, yet some widget scripts pull a framework, web fonts and a full review payload just to render one pill. Open the vendor's demo, watch the network tab, and be unforgiving about it.

How to add a Trustpilot badge to your website

Log in to Trustpilot Business, open the TrustBox library, choose a compact layout and configure the height, theme and star filter. Trustpilot generates two pieces of code: a bootstrap script that belongs once per page, and a div carrying your template ID and business unit ID that goes exactly where the badge should appear. Both have to be present, and the script has to load before the div is parsed.

On WordPress, put the script in the site header through a header hook or a header-and-footer plugin, and put the div in a Custom HTML block rather than the paragraph editor, which strips data attributes. On Shopify, the script goes in theme.liquid and the div in the section or template you want it in. Then purge the page cache and hard refresh, because a cached copy of the old markup is the most common reason a correct install appears to do nothing. Our walkthrough of Trustpilot widget layouts covers the rest of the library.

Why your Trustpilot badge is not showing

In order of how often it turns out to be the cause: the bootstrap script is missing, loaded after the div, or loaded twice. The template ID or business unit ID got mangled by an editor that rewrote the attributes. A cookie consent banner is blocking third-party scripts, so the badge appears for you and not for a visitor who declined tracking. Or the widget is simply not on your plan, which renders as blank space rather than an error message, and is the hardest one to diagnose because nothing in the page tells you.

One more, easy to miss: badges render on the domain configured for that business unit. Testing on a staging URL that Trustpilot has never seen is a reliable way to spend an afternoon debugging code that is already correct.

Is the badge the right thing to be buying?

Worth asking before the 12 month commitment. A badge displays a number you already have. It does not get you more reviews, and a 4.3 across 19 reviews displayed beautifully is still a 4.3 across 19 reviews. If your score is thin, the money is better spent on collecting: a steady invitation flow moves the number, and then the badge has something worth showing.

It is also worth deciding what happens to the review content itself, not just the average. The score belongs on the page next to the button; the patterns inside the reviews, the same complaint surfacing four times a month, belong somewhere a product or operations team will actually read them, alongside usage data and support tickets rather than in a marketing dashboard nobody opens. A badge is the end of that pipeline, not the whole of it.