A BI seat costs $12 or $115 now, when the vendor still sells one

The per-seat list prices, where they still exist: Power BI Pro at $14 a user a month, $24 for Premium Per User; Tableau Creator at $75, rising to $115 on the enterprise cloud tier; Metabase at $6 to $12 a user on top of a monthly base. A ninefold spread, top to bottom, for licenses that all exist to put a bar chart in front of a manager.

The more interesting review is the vendors that quit selling seats. Qlik now prices capacity, "like a cell phone plan" in its own FAQ's words: $300 a month for a starter tier with ten users bundled, then $825 for 25 GB and $2,750 for 50 GB with headcount unmetered. Domo went further into credits, consumed by storage, refreshes and users alike, with no public rate card; independent procurement surveys put typical enterprise deployments in the mid six figures annually before the credit commit.

Which model wins depends, and it depends on your denominator. A wide read-only audience makes seat pricing the tax: five hundred viewers at list is real money at Tableau's rates and a rounding error on a capacity plan. A small team hoarding terabytes inverts it. Credits punish the thing they claim to enable, which is not knowing your usage in advance.

The verdict splits accordingly. Seats, for teams whose reader count is the stable number: worth adopting, and the $12 to $24 band does most of what the $75 band does. Capacity, for wide audiences with governed data volumes: worth pricing out. And a rate card you cannot read before the sales call is a discount you cannot audit afterward; on this page that is two vendors of five, and it is not a coincidence that they are the two whose bills surprise people. We review tools here, but a pricing page is a tool. Some of them work.