Do you mean that as Tableau's cost? Not where I'm at. And maybe you'd have to pay half a mil to implement a data model if you're hiring consultants and starting from scratch, but if you're in such a state that's going to be a cost no matter the product. No product is going to model your data for you or build something like a semantic layer. Those are (mostly) completely separate tasks from the BI layer. Where I'm at we simply pointed Tableau at existing data sources built for performance reporting already.