Analytics & BI Tools · Chapter 7 of 8
Cost, and the three models that bite
BI licensing is priced in ways that punish specific shapes of organisation. Know which shape you are.
Analytics cost has two halves that are usually budgeted separately and interact strongly: licensing, and the warehouse compute the tool consumes.
The licensing models
| Model | Punishes | Typical of |
|---|---|---|
| Per creator + per viewer | Large consumer populations | Tableau |
| Per user, flat | Nothing much at small scale; capacity limits at large | Power BI Pro |
| Capacity / premium | Under-utilisation — you buy the peak | Power BI Premium, Fabric |
| Platform + per user | Small teams; economics improve with scale | Looker |
| Per seat, high | Seat proliferation, which is exactly what happens | Alteryx |
| Open source | Nothing in licence; you pay in engineering time | Superset, Metabase |
The half people forget: warehouse compute
Every dashboard interaction in a live-query tool is a warehouse query. A popular dashboard on DirectQuery or Looker can cost more in compute than the BI licence costs, and it appears on a different budget line so nobody connects them.
- Check last-viewed timestamps. A meaningful share of scheduled refreshes serve dashboards nobody has opened in months.
- Match refresh frequency to actual use. Hourly refreshes on a weekly report is the most common waste in the entire stack.
- Aggregate for dashboards rather than querying raw. A pre-aggregated table serving a dashboard is usually orders of magnitude cheaper than the same dashboard scanning detail rows.
- Cache deliberately, and understand what your tool caches by default — otherwise your optimisation measurements are measuring cache.
- Attribute BI compute to teams, the same as any other warehouse spend.
The number worth producing
Cost per active dashboard consumer per month, licence plus compute together. Almost nobody computes it, and it immediately reveals the reports that cost hundreds of pounds a month to serve four people who could have had a scheduled email.
It also reframes the licensing conversation from a procurement argument into an engineering one, which is a much better place to have it.