hosted BI (Looker, Tableau, Mode) alternatives
business intelligence — dashboards and SQL exploration over your warehouse · charges per-viewer or per-editor seat, which is what makes it expensive once everyone wants a dashboard
Per-viewer pricing is the thing that hurts: the moment dashboards are useful, everybody wants one. Self-hosting removes the per-reader cost and replaces it with a real system to deploy and keep upgraded. Under about ten people, price the hosted option first — your hours cost more.
What actually replaces it
The mature open-source BI platform. Charts rebuild by hand; the hidden cost is upgrades, because it is a multi-service deployment.
A self-hosted business-intelligence platform: dashboards, charts and SQL exploration over your existing databases.
When to just keep paying
- You are a small team — your own hours will cost more than the seats.
- Non-analysts need the guided-analytics polish to self-serve.
Head to head
We deliberately do not quote hosted BI (Looker, Tableau, Mode)'s prices — third-party pricing changes without notice and a stale figure is worse than none. The pricing model is what decides whether replacing it pays, and that is stated above.