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Comment by iheartmemcache | Hacker News Reader

FYI, Metabase is a Thompson Reuters platform. I bet you anything they hold the trademark for the term.

You have a pretty good market opening right now - Crystal Reports just went to a SAP Business Objects-type model. Pentaho doesn't even have a community edition anymore.

It looks like you don't support MDX/snowflake schemas/other OLAP reporting standards, so I'm guessing you're going for the lower end of the market. So two things you should do off the bat - import data from Google Sheets (maybe offer to "unlock" the service for tweets and/or links), and offer an Excel plug-in (free up to X rows).

Also offer to charge if only to allow Bob to go to his manager and say you offer support. In corporate environments, no support is often a no go.

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Everyone in the low end of the business world just uses Tableau or QlikView - neither company is very militant about enforcing their trial licensing; and full versions aren't really all that expensive for a business anyway (~$500 per license per year, but a small company can get away with a single license). Both tools are also much more mature and powerful than this product.

Not saying there's no room for an open source BI platform, but I don't know there's a lot of money in it given the competitive pressure Tableau and Qlik are putting on the SAPs/Oracles of the world. Anything over $100 is going to put you squarely in the realm of real BI tools with MUCH more capability, a much simpler interface, and standardized training programs.

Tableau is ~$2000 a yr, and Qlikview is > $1000 (although the recently released Qliksense is free).

Unless the price changed in the last month since I talked to a sales rep, it's $999 for a desktop license, and $500/yr for "Tableau Online".

That's for the personal edition, which can only connect to CSV, Excel, MS Access, OData and Tableau's proprietary Data Extract format (TDE). Tableau Online requires your data to be stored in their cloud (which might not be acceptable to some IT departments).

And also you need the desktop product to publish to it. Tableau online is a cloud alternative to the on-premise online dashboarding, not for the desktop client.

(Full disclosure: I work at Tableau)

Tableau Online doesn't require you to save your data on our platform if it's stored in AWS, Google, or Azure (example: Amazon Redshift or Aurora). Your can maintain live data connections with datasources hosted on those ecosystems and the source row level data doesn't ever need to land in the Tableau Online platform. More info here: http://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/tableau-online-keep...

Yup, TR has a bioinformatics DB they sell which I think is based on metabase.org. We're in a sufficiently different space that we're hoping it's not a conflict.

We don't explicitly support snowflake schemas but folks are definitely using MB with them them. We have a limited set of joins accessible through the query builder and snowflake schemas work really well.

The BI market is crowded af.

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