Looker Studio: free tier widely used; Looker Studio Pro $9/user/Google-Cloud-PROJECT/month (per-project detail materially inflates agency costs); separate Looker (Google Cloud core) $35K-60K+/yr
Created 2026-06-20
Summary
Claim: Looker Studio — free tier widely used. Looker Studio Pro $9 per user per Google Cloud project per month — the per-project detail materially inflates agency costs (a 12-client agency at 5 users pays ~$6,480/yr, not the headline $540). Separate enterprise Looker (Google Cloud core) runs **$35,000-60,000+/year**. (As of ~2026.)
Source: cloud.google.com/looker/pricing ; Looker Studio Pro docs.
Confidence: Verified.
Why this matters for Candid: The per-project pricing detail is the trap. Worth surfacing explicitly to clients evaluating Looker Studio for agency / multi-client work — the headline price is misleading.
Related entries
Referenced by (2)
- reference Research brief: dashboards for SMBs — what's worth showing, and when an embedded one earns its keep (June 2026) relates-to
- rule R2 — For internal dashboards, default to the cheapest tool that fits the existing stack: Power BI Pro for M365 shops, free Looker Studio for Google/marketing data, Metabase for SQL-comfortable / future-embedding depends-on