# Cost Per Query: Your dashboards are about to look expensive

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2025-10-04
- **Format:** Video · 15 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Industry trends, Tool strategy, Data visualisation
- **Tools:** Snowflake (warehouses); Tableau (cloud, prep)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/cost-per-query-your-dashboards-are-about-to-look-expensive
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQW0RlrL3dE

This is the third video in my perspective series, where I explain how consumption-based pricing, or cost per query, is about to hit the Tableau ecosystem through Tableau Next. I walk through how Tableau pricing has evolved from seats and cores to cloud and now consumption, and why this could change the way you build dashboards.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau's pricing has shifted from fixed seats and cores to cloud convenience and now to consumption, where the more you use the more you pay.
- Cost per query means every chart, filter click and interaction becomes a chargeable event - one dashboard with four charts used by ten users at five interactions can generate around 500 billable activities in a day.
- Tableau Next connects to Data Cloud in real time with no extract concept, so caching works differently and queries are constantly running in the background.
- Salesforce wants to consolidate previously separate invoices (Tableau, Snowflake, AI credits, dbt) into a single Salesforce bill, which makes the true cost of running dashboards far more visible and involves new stakeholders like IT.
- Consumption pricing risks decoupling visualisation best practice from cost-driven practice, pushing teams toward simpler, cheaper charts to minimise queries.

## Chapters

- 0:00 The cost per query premise
- 1:08 Heritage of Tableau pricing: seats and cores
- 2:06 The shift to cloud and consumption
- 3:53 Lessons from Snowflake compute and storage
- 6:06 Consolidating invoices under Salesforce
- 10:47 How consumption changes dashboard interactions
- 12:59 What is a dashboard actually worth

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/cost-per-query-your-dashboards-are-about-to-look-expensive

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena