What's Covered
You’ve done your research and know exactly how adding user-facing analytics to your tool can increase your product’s perceived and real value. It’s possible you’ve been looking for ways to build an analytics experience into your product but haven’t fully decided on the way to go.
Businesses and end-users want to get insights, analyze trends, and make data-driven decisions. However, the cost and complexity of implementing a robust user-facing analytics solution can be intimidating.
To help you make a well-considered, cost-effective decision, we’ll explore the different embedded analytics platforms’ pricing structures. Whether you're looking for a no-code approach vs an SDK, automation vs control, a platform for startups vs enterprise, or anything else, we'll cover the best options.
We’ll also delve into the key factors that impact pricing, including data storage, user licensing, and customization requirements.
Looking for a solution to build fast, interactive, fully bespoke analytics into your app? Check out Embeddable.
The value behind embedded analytics
Embedded analytics has many benefits. It fundamentally improves the real and perceived value of your product or service for your customers. This happens either by showing them the value they already get—e.g. time saved after using your tool—or by creating new value in the form of actionable insights—e.g. showing users a list of their daily distractions.
While embedded analytics is basically showing analytical data to your customers using an external embedding tool, you could also achieve the same advantages by building it from scratch. Of course, if the price tag is too high for either of those options, you may end up leaving that epic on the backlog for a long time.
Embedding analytics can also drive operational efficiencies for your internal team. By adding charts, dashboards, and reports to your application, you empower users to access and analyze information directly within the tool they already use. This eliminates the need for your team to run separate data extraction and analysis processes, saving time and effort—all while making users feel more engaged and enabled.
And, if a user is engaged with your app and finds value in it, they’ll likely use it for longer and recommend it to others. This results in more retention and word-of-mouth recommendations, which can bring you more business—improving your return on investment (ROI).
Another way to maximize ROI with customer-facing data is by upselling it as an added feature or bundled into a higher-paying plan. Pricing models for embedded analytics tend to reflect the value that users get from having robust analytics capabilities at their fingertips. This can include factors such as the number of users, the complexity of data analysis, and the level of customization you need.
So, assuming you’re ready to move your customer-facing analytics epic from the backlog into the roadmap (we've done a deep-dive on the best ways to build analytics into your app here), let’s explore what it will cost to reap the benefits of embedding analytics into your tool—and the pros and cons of the different third-party embedded analytics tools.
Different pricing approaches for embedding analytics
Before jumping into the different ways of adding analytics to your app, let’s cover the four different ways pricing works and its pros and cons. It’s important to highlight that pricing can also be a combination of these models—e.g. a tool can be both feature- and user-based.
Seat-based or user-based pricing
The cost is determined by the number of individual users or seats that access your analytics. It’s a beneficial approach for small businesses with a steady user base because it tells you exactly how much you’ll be paying.
However, some tools in this category charge separately for internal and external users or see devices as different seats.
It can be counterproductive if you have a growing or ever-changing user base as this approach can be expensive and hard to predict. Plus, this pricing model doesn’t accurately reflect the value the software or service provides to each user, which might lead you to overpay or underestimate the individual benefit.
Usage-based pricing
You pay based on how much you actually use the tool. Platforms can measure usage in the number of API calls or the amount of consumed storage or processed data.
This approach is generally more suitable for B2B companies because they earn more per customer compared to B2C firms—and make analytics actually affordable. However, this approach to pricing can be hard to budget because you can’t always assess precisely how much a customer will use your tool. So you can end up paying more than expected, affecting your profit margins.
Feature-based pricing
The cost varies depending on the specific features you want to access within the app. Some embedded analytics and BI tools will change their price depending on the available features. For example, you need to pay extra to access more than one data schema in a tool like Explo.
This model is beneficial for teams who don’t necessarily need to pay for the fanciest features. It can be very cost-efficient and it’s great for scaling teams because they can use the same app consistently as they grow. However, this approach can cause you to have poor budget planning and teams might find themselves needing to access a gated feature after already using the platform.
Service-based or fixed pricing
This is the hardest to find in SaaS tools but the best one for many businesses. Here, you pay a monthly or annual fee for the service and get access to the agreed set of features, usage, seats, and benefits.
Its biggest benefit is that this pricing model allows you to grow your business without worrying about increasing your tech expenses. The downside is that, depending on the tool, this approach might not always be affordable to small businesses with limited needs.
Note: We understand that the benefits of fixed pricing massively outweigh those of other pricing models, so we offer Embeddable on fixed-price annual and multi-annual contracts, with unlimited usage (users, dashboards & viewers) and a standard break clause at 3 months to allow you to build a POC. Book a call with the team to find out more.
Summary: pricing models, costs, pros and cons.
Here’s a short summary of the different options for embedding analytics available in the market, its pricing model, monthly costs, pros, and cons. We’ll get into more detail below:
Popular Embedded Analytics Tools' Pricing
1. Embeddable
Embeddable is a toolkit for building custom analytics and interactive reports for your app, that look and feel just like your platform.
The best way to embed user-facing analytics used to be by building it yourself. A custom-built analytics experience lets you offer dynamic views of your customer’s information using eye-catching designs that are aligned with your overall branding.
However, we know how complex it is to build customer-facing analytics from scratch. It can take several sprints (or even epics) to develop and launch, and it can be highly expensive.
Embeddable combines a front-end toolkit, backend engine, and no-code builder that lets you build fully bespoke analytics experiences for your customers—without the cost of building from scratch.
With Embeddable, you get the quality and customization you need from tailored solutions, and the ease of use and simplicity of using embedded BI or embedded analytics tools. This way you can develop your own customer-facing analytics any way you want them, but in 10% of the time—and at a very accessible price.
Embeddable Pricing
Embeddable offers fixed pricing that doesn't scale with your usage, or the amount of customers you show it to. That means you can roll it out to your user-base with confidence, without worrying about potential surprises later.
What’s included?
When you choose Embeddable you get:
- Front-end toolkit which reduces the time it takes to build charting components and modifiers, letting you use open-source libraries like D3.js, Google Charts, and Highcharts if you want to.
- Backend engine for delivering live fast-loading data while handling, security, caching, and infrastructure requirements.
- No-code builder to enable non-technical team members to create and edit your dashboards using a simple point-and-click interface - allowing you to add new visualizations without involving a developer..
- Dedicated Account Manager to ensure the successful delivery of your analytics project
- Additional Services e.g. custom SLA's, embedded engineers etc.
In addition to the time saving, you’ll be able to embed fully bespoke user-facing analytics into your app without worrying about building things like row-level security and caching yourself. Plus, you’ll get access to a community and developer’s docs to ensure a smooth implementation and a fully-bespoke user experience for your customers.
Want to find out more about how to achieve fully-bespoke, highly performant analytics with Embeddable? Click here to learn more
Next, we'll take a look at some BI tools with embedding functionality.
Traditional BI tools like Power BI, Looker, Reveal BI, or Metabase all offer embedding capabilities. However, while these could work for embedding user-facing analytics quickly using your own datasets, traditional BI tools are more suited to a different use case: offering self-service analytics to internal teams.
This makes BI solutions quite limited when it comes to embedding them into your solution as you can’t make heavy changes to their design or craft the exact experience you want for your end-users.
Prices for these kinds of tools vary enormously because each tool has a different approach to pricing. From our research, we’ve seen it can cost you anything from $1,000 - $120,000 per month to embed analytics using a traditional BI tool. To explore these options in-depth, we’ve listed the different things you get at which price:
2. Microsoft Power BI Embedded Analytics pricing
Power BI’s embedded analytics tool lets you integrate analytics and power bi reports into your app and white-label them with a few customization options. It provides flexible pricing plans tailored to your needs so you can embed fully interactive dashboards and reports into your app.
You can try Power BI Embedded for free or pay for one of its plans. These vary per node type and the number of deployed nodes, starting at $735.91 per month for an A1 node with 3GB of RAM capacity and one virtual core—any additional needs immediately duplicate the costs and jump up to $1,465.91 per month.
Prices go up to $23,542.94 per month for an A6 node with 100GB of RAM and 32 virtual cores, and any more than that requires a custom quote. Power BI works with Azure and lets you pay by month, by hour, or as you go.
Note that to use Power BI Embedded, you need to be subscribed to Power BI Pro (i.e. you need a Power BI Pro License), which is an additional $10 per user per month and can make this option very expensive. “You have to pay per user when distributing dashboards, even when the users are only readers,” says a Power BI user on G2.
This makes Power BI Embedded both a usage- and user-based solution that takes fixed hourly or monthly rates for billing.
You can learn more about Microsoft PowerBI's Embedded features and functionality here, and find alternatives based on PowerBI's limitations here.
3. Looker Embedded pricing
Looker Embedded is an enterprise-grade tool that lets you build embedded analytics in little time, display them to your customers, and build interconnected workflows. Looker is one of the top-rated BI tools in the market and its embedded analytics module supports:
- Building real-time loading user-facing dashboards for end users
- Access to secure iframe configuration
- Interactive iFrame to make dashboards self-service
- Embedding via Looker API
Looker pricing is composed of three main parts:
- Platform pricing: The cost of running Looker, including administration, integrations, and semantic modeling capabilities
- User pricing: The cost of each individual license according to the user permissions
- Management: Looker typically requires you to have a dedicated team to set it up and manage it, so you’ll also want to consider the cost of this on top of the license fees.
You can only access embedding capabilities in Looker’s Embedded annual plan. It allows for 10 standard users (access folders, dashboards, charts), 2 developer users (can write code within the tool), and up to 500,000 query-based API calls per month (usually from the end user).
The price is available on a custom quote basis, but we found a breakdown of retail prices for Looker in the AWS Marketplace that may or may not be applicable to your business:
Reddit users share that Looker charges the same amount for internal and end-users for dashboard visibility even though end-users only see a small percentage of the business data. In the comments, people complain about Looker being a very expensive solution.
Looker is one of the cases we mentioned above, despite seeming like it charges a fixed price, the costs vary depending on usage and users' unique needs. Even as a fixed quote, Looker might feel too expensive for many businesses.
We've done a deepdive into Looker's customer-facing functionality here, and you can find top alternatives based on Looker's known limitations here.
4. Reveal BI embedded analytics pricing
Reveal BI is a self-service BI tool with embedding capabilities that offers cloud-hosted or self-hosted options. It offers different pricing plans to meet users’ unique needs, including a time-limited free trial, monthly plans, and an annual plan.
You can get a fixed Embedded Analytics plan for enterprises on a custom quote. It’s fixed because Reveal BI doesn’t charge per user or usage, instead, its sales team comes up with a tailor-made price for your business. You get an opportunity to negotiate, but you might end up feeling that you’ve overpaid for the value it ultimately delivers.
With Reveal BI, you get access to a quick integration, sophisticated statistical functions, and in-app modeling. However, customers reported on G2 that they couldn’t choose custom colors for individual visualizations. While Reveal BI claims that you can change ‘fonts, background and foreground colors, and visualization color palettes’ on its standard charting components, that’s ultimately not enough to make it look and feel like it’s really part of your platform.
5. Metabase embedded pricing
Metabase is a no-code BI tool for teams who need to ask ad hoc queries and see answers in a visual dashboard but comes with an SQL editor if you need to write more complex requests. It offers embedding capabilities for you to integrate those data visualizations into your product.
This BI tool offers two different pricing options for cloud-hosted or self-hosted. In any case, embedding capabilities are available for users using either the Pro or Enterprise plans. Metabase lets users access these key features:
- Query interface
- Multi-tenant data analytics
- White-labeling
- Custom fonts and colors
Metabase offers three different pricing options for its users with available versions for cloud-hosted or self-hosted. Embedding capabilities are only available on its second tier, a Pro package that supports 10 users for $500 per month—whatever your hosting preferences. This plan comes with:
- Unlimited charts and dashboards
- Interactive embedding
- White-label options for you to add your logo and brand colors
- Row and columns security
- Serialization (only available on-premise)
Price-wise, Metabase offers a competitive proposition on the lower tiers of their pricing plans. However, if this plan doesn’t meet your needs, then you’re quickly into enterprise pricing territory—which starts at $15,000 per year.
Whilst it’s one of the more powerful embedded BI tools, one of the key drawbacks of Metabase is that it really looks like Metabase (and not your brand) when you embed it into your app. Anyone who has used it themselves will be able to instantly recognize the charts aren’t actually part of your platform.
Section wrap-up: While embedding BI tools can be a quick solution, they can be expensive and not highly customizable. You might not want to pay for the whole BI tool if you only need embedding capabilities.
To achieve a fully-native experience you’ll typically need to build analytics yourself or use a toolkit like Embeddable that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you so you can offer a fully-custom user experience.
Next, we'll take a look at two dedicated embedded analytics tools
Embedding BI dashboards into your product can be a very useful and quick solution, especially if you’re already familiar with the tool. But, you can still embed analytics without paying the cost of an enterprise-level BI tool.
That’s why dedicated embedded analytics software was made—but it’s worth being aware of some of the drawbacks of using an embedded analytics tool before making a purchase.
Based on our research, you can embed analytics into your product with one of these tools from around $700 all the way up to tens of thousands per month. Some examples of these tools include:
6. Explo Pricing
Explo is an example of an embedded analytics platform that lets internal team members create dashboards for integrating customer-facing analytics into their products. It offers different pricing tiers, starting with a free plan containing unlimited internal dashboards, creators, and viewers—but this doesn’t allow you to embed analytics for your customers.
To embed customer-facing analytics into your app, prices start at $695 per month for 25 ‘customer groups’. However, at this pricing tier, you’re required to include their logo watermark on your final design.
In Explo’s Pro (starting at $1,995/month) and Enterprise plans, users get access to unlimited embedded dashboard templates and data schemas, as well as being able to remove their logo from your dashboards.
However, since Explo is both user- and feature-based the price can go up quickly. You can end up paying a similar price for Explo as you would for a classic BI tool with an embedding feature but without the benefit of internal BI features (or the level of customization you get with a custom build).
7. Luzmo (formerly Cumul.io)
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Luzmo, previously known as Cumul.io, is an embedded analytics solution that helps developers add interactive, customer-facing dashboards to their applications. Its features include a drag-and-drop dashboard editor, a range of themeable widgets, and seamless integration with many data sources.
Luzmo offers four pricing options: Basic, Pro, Elite, and Enterprise. The Basic plan, priced at $950 per month includes a monthly limit of 100 active viewers and one active designer. This plan provides the necessary functionality for small-scale implementation.
The Pro plan, priced at $1950 per month includes a monthly limit of 500 active viewers and five active designers. Additionally, the Pro plan offers the ability to remove Luzmo branding, providing users with a more customized and white-labeled experience.
The Elite plan, priced at $2950 per month allows for 1,000 active viewers and 50 active designers and comes with a dashboard editor. If you’re offering a B2C product, or have more than 1,000 end users then you’ll need to get a custom quote for Luzmo’s Enterprise plan, which, at the time of writing, they do not publish a price for.
Since Luzmo is usage- and feature-based, you might struggle to find a plan that fits both your customer base and feature requirements. For instance, you might want to be able to remove Luzmo’s branding, but you don’t have the revenue that comes from having 500 monthly active users.
Section wrap-up: While dedicated embedded analytics tools can have more customization freedom, these are still not highly editable. Plus, they appear to be less expensive at first glance but might end up costing as much as a BI solution with fewer benefits for your internal team.
You may be thinking ‘why would you pay highly for a solution that lacks customization and features?’ Looking at an option like Embeddable to build fully bespoke charts and analytics might be a better choice.
Another approach: a custom build
Apart from using BI or embedded analytics tools, or using Embeddable, you could choose to build custom user-facing analytics into your product. As mentioned, this used to be the best way to get eye-catching, branded, and highly interactive analytics embedded into your tool, without a monthly tooling fee.
However, building embedded analytics from scratch can be time-consuming and very expensive, especially since the cost is split into 3 parts:
- Technology expenses. You need to consider the cost of closed-source charting libraries (although you can find free ones), hosting, licenses, servers, testing tools, and any other software-development tech expenses.
- Team hours. It can take you multiple sprints to develop a custom solution, so you need to account for your team’s time. For a project like this you need at least three people for a basic implementation, including a full-stack developer, a designer, and a project manager. That’s on top of the cost of future ongoing iterations, debugging, maintenance, and developing new chart/data requests.
- Opportunity costs. Choosing to develop a custom-built embedded analytics experience is very demanding and complex. This means that while you develop this, you might be pushing back the development of features that could help you hit your KPIs.
To achieve a truly remarkable analytics experience, you’ll need the capacity to develop it in-house, or to hire a software development agency to take on the project for you. For many teams this can result in failing to prioritize their user-facing analytics project - and ultimately an epic with the potential to deliver outsized impact on their KPIs can be left idle on their backlog.
Customization matters: Building tailored analytics in 10% of the time
It’s clear that there are huge potential benefits to adding customer-facing analytics to your app, and you might find that the cost is easily outweighed by its value. However, when considering whether to use embedded business intelligence and analytics tools for your app, it’s important to ensure that you’re getting good value for money. While tools like Explo, Luzmo, Metabase, or Power BI offer various pricing tiers, they may fall short when tailoring the analytics experience to your users' needs.
You can find embedding analytics options at all price points, but dig deeper, and you’ll find there are more attained costs than what you initially considered. Restrictions on viewers and designers, and paying extra for using a modern embedding solution (i.e. not an iFrame) often mean you’re looking at the higher price points to deliver a remarkable analytics experience to your customers.
Either way, embedding a third-party tool will come with an inherent lack of customization, which can severely inhibit the user experience you’ll be able to deliver and ultimately affect your brand reputation. Building a fully custom, comprehensive analytics solution from scratch based on your unique designs can yield better results, but it can be very costly.
If you want to deliver the dream user experience to your customers, and don’t want to invest in the costs associated with building from scratch, then Embeddable may be the solution for you. With this toolkit, you’ll be able to achieve your dream analytics experience by taking advantage of the flexibility you gain from owning the code yourself. All while benefiting from a platform that handles all the things your developers don’t want to waste their time on. This way, you can offer your customers the best possible solution without breaking the bank.
Want to find out more about how to achieve fully-bespoke, highly performant analytics with Embeddable? Click here to learn more
Frequently asked questions about user-facing analytics examples
How much does it cost to embed analytics with Power BI?
The cost of embedding analytics with Power BI depends on various factors, such as your number of users, the level of customization you need, and your licensing model.
Power BI offers different pricing tiers, including Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium, starting at $10 per user per month. Then, you need to pay for embedding capabilities regarding your nodes, RAM memory size, and virtual cores. Here’s a complete breakdown:
What’s the best value-for money way to embed analytics into my app?
If you want to build an analytics experience that looks and feels like part of your own app (unlike with other embedded analytics tools), then the best option to embed analytics into your app could be by using Embeddable. It combines a front-end toolkit, backend engine, and no-code builder that enables you to get a fully bespoke feel without the usual development cost of building from scratch, and offers flat pricing that doesn't scale with your usage.