Introducing Trustwards, why we decided to build it and what is coming.
Jose TamuWhen we started working on Trustwards, the aim wasn’t to build "another CMP". I've been building products for years, and I kept running into the same frustration: consent experiences that looked terrible, felt generic, and still left people unsure if they were truly compliant. Trustwards is our way of fixing that, starting from the details that matter to both users and teams.
Let me start from the beginning.
Why CMPs are necessary
A CMP (Consent Management Platform) is, as the name suggests, a platform that allows websites to manage user consent from multiple angles, for both site owners and visitors.
From solo founders to large enterprises, compliance is a tedious part of building products: keeping everything up to date, storing records, and managing all the moving pieces. CMPs provide the tools needed to handle all of this. If you don’t want to hire more people, waste countless hours, or lose sleep worrying whether you’re doing things properly or if new regulations have come into effect, it’s always better to delegate consent management to a CMP.
Website owners are also responsible for choosing an appropriate solution. Today there's a lot of noise, and a long list of consent providers that don't even do the bare minimum: blocking cookies.
A CMP should handle consent flawlessly and provide website owners with real tools: blocking elements on the site until the categories they belong to have been enabled by the user, keeping a record of the consent given and the texts shown to the user at all times, providing site scans and automatic category assignment, exporting the stored consents, integrating with external services, supporting Google Consent Mode v2, Analytics, DSAR workflows, Policies generator... and a long etcetera that could easily fill several articles.
There are very few CMPs that can honestly claim to handle consent impeccably on the client side and provide website owners with every tool they actually need. As a product builder, I've felt that tension first-hand: wanting to move fast and ship, while also knowing that ignoring consent and privacy is basically accumulating legal and ethical debt.
And there is one BIG thing all CMPs get wrong.
Why current CMPs fall short
A user's experience on a website starts with the very first thing they see. The consent banner is often the first element that catches their attention, and therefore the first impression they get of your brand. That's why consent management is a huge opportunity to influence how your organization is perceived - and also a huge opportunity to damage it.
How many websites have you seen where the consent experience has nothing to do with the site's look and feel, because it's clearly coming from the same CMP everyone else is using? Come on... it feels like you've already visited that website before. They're copies of copies.
And how many websites have you seen with a consent experience that's actually tailored and aligned with the rest of the brand? You mostly see this with larger organizations that take their brand perception very seriously. That's when you think: okay, these people mean business.
Most CMPs today offer banners that not only break the branding, but are also generic, poorly designed, and in the best case scenario where customization is possible, offer just a handful of shallow options, with no real care for delivering a proper design experience.
This is a very common problem and a real pain point that current consent providers don't seem to care about. Website owners are asking for a CMP that not only gives them all the tools they need to manage consent in a friendly, simple, and effective way, but also includes a powerful builder that makes their consent experience feel unique and fully in tune with the organization it represents.
If you care about how your product looks and feels, it's painful when the very first interaction on your site, the consent banner, feels like it belongs to someone else's brand.
Introducing Trustwards
Trustwards not only handles client-side consent flawlessly and gives website owners all the tools they need to manage consent, bringing their site in line with international regulations in under a minute after installation (literally), but it also introduces a truly disruptive product in the CMP space: the Trustwards Builder.
Banner & Modal
There are two core components: the Banner and the Modal. Both have their own internal structure made up of elements. You can create, move, duplicate, and delete these elements as you wish. This gives you layout-level control, not just a couple of color pickers and text fields.
Themes
Trustwards comes with a wide variety of themes that you can switch to at any time. You can apply them to your site as they are, or use them as a starting point and customize them to match your brand. It's a fast way to get to something that looks good, without sacrificing the ability to fine-tune every detail later.
Toolbar
Elements are created from the toolbar. There's a broad range available, from general layout elements like divs or text blocks, to powerful consent-specific elements such as Categories, Open Modal, Accept All, and many more. So instead of hacking around generic UI elements, you get elements that already "speak consent" out of the box.
Customizable canvas
The color of the builder canvas is fully editable: you can choose any color or pick from a wide range of gradients. This doesn't produce any output on the live site, but it makes the editing experience much more pleasant.
Breakpoints and responsiveness
All element styles can be adapted to different devices using breakpoints, so you can guarantee a fully responsive consent experience. Your consent banner won't break on mobile, which is where most of your visitors actually are.
Settings
In the settings you'll find enhancements related to consent, such as blocking interactions until the user has made a choice, as well as copying data attributes exposed by Trustwards so that other elements on your site can trigger consent-related actions.
The best part is that Trustwards doesn't just include this builder to let you design the front-end of your consent experience exactly the way you want. Trustwards is a full-featured CMP from day one, with many more capabilities: Scanner and automatic category assignment, Proof of Consent, Consent Analytics, Integrations, and Google Consent Mode v2. All of it is managed through a smooth, user-friendly dashboard. In other words: you get both the depth you need to stay compliant and the flexibility you want to stay on-brand.
And this is just the beginning, there's much more to come.
What's next for Trustwards
Trustwards is already a powerful CMP from day one. But this is only the first step. There are many more features and milestones ahead:
Policy generator based on all your website data, hosted in Trustwards and always kept up to date as your site evolves.
Self-service DSAR handling, allowing users to see all the consents they've given and delete all their data at any time through embedded forms, so you can comply with Data Subject Access Requests without intermediaries.
Multi-language support to display the front-end in each visitor's native language.
Geolocation rules to determine whether to show consent management (and how) based on the user's location.
IAB and Google CMP partner certification to align with major industry standards.
On top of that: more integrations, more animations, more elements, A/B testing, and much more. The roadmap of disruptive features we're bringing into Trustwards is extensive, and we hope you'll be part of the process, and part of Trustwards.
This is our current roadmap, but it's not a closed list. If you're building a product with specific needs around consent, branding, or compliance, I'd genuinely love to hear from you and shape Trustwards together.
If any of this resonates with you, I'd be happy to have you with us from day one, whether as a customer, a partner, or simply someone who cares about doing consent right. You can try Trustwards, share your feedback, or just follow along as we keep building.