Self-Service Pricing for Self-Service BI

In November 2020, we removed license minimums for our Starter and Professional plans. You can check out the details on our pricing page.

At its core, this pricing change is about making world-class business intelligence more accessible to more organizations. Specifically, we’d like to help businesses ensure that all of their employees have the power to understand, analyze, and make decisions based on data. Businesses that have gained this ability to arm their employees with data (which we call democratized data) tend to be more agile, creative, and resilient.

In the past 10 years, we’ve helped many of our customers gain this ability, from DataRobot to Clever to Prezi. Throughout that time, we’ve learned a ton about what it means to democratize data at scale. And removing licensing minimums for the Starter and Professional plans is one of our first steps to acting on what we’ve learned.

The Quick Details of Our Pricing Changes

Now, you can sign up for both the Starter and Professional plans with one license (in the past, we had a minimum of five licenses per plan). And you try either of them out right now with a free 14-day trial — no credit card required..

The Professional plan is our standard package, which runs $60/month per license (annual billing), with no license minimum. This plan is the “Goldilocks” plan, with a robust feature set that suits the needs of most of our clients just right, including:

• Alerts and notification controls
• Data warehouse connections and 1 MM rows of data stores
• Custom themes

The Starter plan is our streamlined package and comes in at $40/month per license (annual billing), with no license minimum. It’s great for companies just getting off the ground with Chartio or business intelligence in general, including all the features you need to identify and share insights:

• Scheduled reports and the ability to share on Slack
• In-dashboard comments and collaboration
• Unlimited interactive dashboards

Finally, the Organization plan is our most complete offering, best suited for teams of more than 30. Its pricing did not change because it doesn’t bill by license, but it is highly customizable. For instance, we offer viewer pricing, where you pay a reduced rate for those who only need to view the dashboards but not create them. This customizability makes this plan great for companies that intend to scale quickly, like CareLinx, and extend business intelligence to every facet of their growing business without breaking the bank.

See a full comparison of pricing plan features here.

Why We Removed the License Minimum for Two of Our Plans

We listened to our users. We’ve been running extensive user tests to understand how our clients and prospect interact with our product for the past two years. And the two main messages we received are very clear:

1. Our old pricing structure was easily misconstrued.
2. BI adoption tends to have a domino effect.

When evaluating Chartio as a BI platform, we realized, through data we gathered with user tests, that people didn’t know what features our product had and thus didn’t realize we had a significantly differentiated offering. So our first step was to clearly define what you get for each plan.

Then, we removed license minimums because we found that BI adoption usually started with a small group—typically, a product team that needed access to data that the engineers were too busy to provide—and spread from there. Once the sales team saw what the product team was up to with their fancy Chartio dashboards, they wanted a piece of the action, too.

Put simply, the process of adopting BI at an organizational level tends to have a domino effect. Often, all it takes is one employee leveraging Chartio to get the ball rolling. It rarely comes as a result of an order from on high.

A great example of this in action is ButterflyMX. Their journey started with one employee: Jack Lewis, a senior product manager. He wanted access to business data in order to better address the needs of ButterflyMX’s clients, so the engineering team stepped up to help.

The issue was that their solution of using SQL directly was pretty laborious and time consuming. Jack would’ve had to re-learn SQL and the engineering team would’ve had to set time aside to help set up the direct access he needed. Jack described this process as a simply, “a bad use of my time.” It took both Jack’s and the engineering team’s attention away from customer wins and the all-important product roadmap.

To bypass this bottleneck, Jack started looking for a self-service business intelligence (BI) platform. He eventually landed on Chartio because it was easy to set up and inexpensive compared to the other options (some of which cost $30,000 to $40,000 to set up).

Once he was up and running with Chartio, word spread quickly. Everyone wanted access to his dashboards and the ability to make their own—from the engineers themselves to the COO in boardroom meetings to other product managers.

And ButterflyMX isn’t the only company that has followed this path to data democracy. Clever’s product team started using Chartio, and now, 90% of the company regularly uses it. All it takes is one team or one employee to kick things off.

We Want to Help You Stay Agile

Starting with one inexpensive license allows your Chartio usage to grow as fast or as slow as needed. If you only need one license, you can buy one for less than the cost of a team lunch. If you need to add another license, you can do so in a matter of minutes.

The point is that you’re not locked in. You’ll have full-service powerful BI at your fingertips for as little as $40/month. And as you scale, that platform scales with you. The price will never outpace the value you get from Chartio. It’ll always be the exact amount of access your team requires at any given time.

What’s more, this agile approach is resonating. The preliminary results show that our marketing qualified trial (MQT) to win ratio has improved by about 44% since removing license minimums. This improvement is an early indication that lowering the barrier of entry for business intelligence is something the market needs right now, and we’re happy to oblige.

You’ll Be Buying Into a Living Product

As we mentioned, we’ve learned a lot from helping our customers democratize data in the last 10 years. These pricing changes are the start of much more on the way, including a brand-new library of visualizations. It’s never been this easy, inexpensive, or rewarding to get started with Chartio.