Tableau’s new subscription pricing

On behalf of everyone here at Tableau, I’m pleased to share our new subscription pricing model for all of our products. For both existing and new customers, this model signifies our ongoing commitment to helping people more easily adopt and scale Tableau with greater flexibility.

We know this new pricing model and the flexibility it represents is important to you. As Tableau’s new leader of Sales, Services and Support, I spent my first eight weeks on the road meeting with customers, partners, analysts and our Tableau team, learning how people and organizations benefit from the power of Tableau. I heard directly the impact that seeing and understanding data is having on your organizations. And, just as clearly, Tableau has heard a desire for more flexibility in how customers adopt and scale their analytics.

Subscription pricing is a way of paying a lower price to use software for a specific period of time, rather than paying a higher up-front price to own it perpetually. So, yes, it’s very similar to your cell phone plan, Netflix account, or gym membership. We are enabling you to gain the benefits of subscriptions, whether you run Tableau on your own premises, in the public cloud, or via Tableau Online (our fully managed SaaS offering in the cloud).

With subscription pricing, we’re helping people and organizations deploy our industry-leading products in a way that best suits their immediate needs. As those needs change, subscriptions also make it easier to scale at any size, from a two-person startup to a global enterprise. Need to add a Tableau Desktop license for a new employee on your team? Easy. Need to add 150 more Tableau Server users for a department that now wants to do self-service visual analytics? Sure thing. Need to scale across a global enterprise? No problem. With subscription, it will be even easier to modify Tableau deployments without impacting product performance or your productivity.

The new pricing model also lowers the cost of entry. Instead of paying the full cost of a perpetual license up-front, you only pay for your first year commitment. So you can plan and budget for deployments as you scale. And, since it’s Tableau, you get a complete, best-in-class business intelligence solution from day one with no hidden costs. Unlike some other providers out there, we don’t want our customers and partners to worry about additional fees for sharing or collaborating, data storage costs, or hardware restrictions that complicate your deployment options or lead to budget overages. To learn more about the value Tableau provides, read Bill Kirwin's (creator of Gartner’s IT Total Cost of Ownership methodology) report on Tableau's total cost of ownership.

From the flexibility of booking your Tableau investment as an operating expense, to scaling up at your own pace, many of you already benefit from a subscription-based approach to software. In fact, some of our largest customers have shifted to this model, and over 5,700 customer accounts have seen the success of subscription with Tableau Online. We’re now extending the benefits of subscription pricing to everyone.

Finally, one of the things about subscription-based pricing we are most excited about is that it sharpens our commitment to earning your business over and over. Like other subscriptions, you’ll have the choice to renew your Tableau investment every year. This lowers your risk, because you can leave us if you don’t feel we are performing. We’ll happily make that bet, because we intend to delight you. That means everything we do here at Tableau is, as always, focused on our customer’s success and delivering value every day of the year. Our subscription model is based on this core principle.

That’s why you can expect every release, every new product, every program and every step we take to remain true to our mission: To help people better see and understand data.

See our new pricing