The Ecomm Analyst

Power BI comes up in DTC conversations for one of two reasons. Somebody already has it bundled with Microsoft 365, or a consultant put it in a deck. It is a serious tool and I have no complaints about what it renders. The question is whether it fits a store doing $1M to $20M, where the reporting problem is almost never the chart library.

Microsoft publishes its pricing openly, which I appreciate. Pro is $14 per user per month paid yearly and Premium Per User is $24. There is a free account, but you can author on it and not share, which makes it a solo workbench rather than a reporting system. The detail that catches people out is that viewers need licenses too. Three people building reports and nine reading them is twelve seats, not three.

The bigger issue is that Power BI knows nothing about your business out of the box. It does not understand Shopify orders, Meta spend, or Klaviyo sends. You supply that, which means connectors, a warehouse, or someone exporting CSVs on a Monday. That work is the project. The license is the cheap part.

1. Looker Studio

Free, and genuinely so for the core product. If your reporting is mostly GA4, Google Ads, Sheets, and BigQuery, it will get you a long way without a purchase order. Looker Studio Pro is a paid self-service upgrade through Google Cloud, licensed per user, and mainly buys organizational ownership rather than new charting powers. That matters more than it sounds. On the free tier reports belong to whoever built them, so when that person leaves the dashboards can leave too.

The weakness is everything that is not Google. Pulling in Meta, TikTok, or Shopify data usually means paying a third-party connector vendor, and those subscriptions add up quickly enough that the free headline stops meaning much.

2. Metabase

The open source edition is free to self-host. Metabase Cloud Starter is $100 per month with the first five users included and $6 per user per month after that. Pro is $575 per month with ten users included and $12 per user beyond, and Enterprise starts at $20,000 per year. There is a 14-day trial on the paid cloud plans.

Worth flagging that several roundups report the $100 figure as per user. It is not. It is $100 for the plan with five users included, and that distinction changes the math enormously for a small team.

Metabase is a query and visualization layer, not a data pipeline. It connects to a database you already have. Without one you are buying a warehouse and an ingestion tool before Metabase does anything useful, and that is the part that stalls. I wrote more about where it fits in my Metabase alternatives roundup.

3. ThoughtMetric

ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, is a different shape of tool and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend it is a Power BI replacement. It is marketing attribution and reporting built specifically for e-commerce, so the ad platform and Shopify connections are the product rather than a project you scope. Pricing is $99 per month with all features available at every tier, priced on pageviews rather than seats, with a 14-day free trial. The tracking is a single async pixel plus server-side tagging, which is why it does not slow sites down.

Where it does not help you is the operational side. If the reports you need are inventory aging, tax summaries, or a P&L, this is the wrong category and you should keep reading. It answers marketing performance questions well and does not pretend to be a general BI platform.

4. Databox

Databox prices by data source rather than by seat, which inverts the Power BI problem. On annual billing there is a free plan with three data sources, one user, and one dashboard. Analyst is $64 per month with five sources and one user. Pro is $159 per month with unlimited users and three sources included, then $5.60 per month for each additional source. Growth is $399 per month, and there is a custom tier above that.

Read the data source definition carefully before you budget. Each account or property counts separately, so three GA4 properties is three sources, not one. A store running two ad platforms, GA4, Shopify, and Klaviyo is past the included allowance immediately.

5. Domo

Domo publishes no prices. Its pricing pages describe a credit-based consumption model where storage, refreshes, transformations, and AI features all draw down a purchased credit pool, and there is a 30-day free trial with no card required. That is the whole of what the vendor commits to publicly. Consumption pricing is not automatically bad, but it is hard to forecast before you have run the thing, and for a store in this band I would not start here.

What I would actually do

If the reporting you are missing is marketing performance, buy something that already speaks to ad platforms and skip the BI project. If the gap is operational reporting across finance and inventory, Power BI or Metabase is reasonable, but budget for the pipeline rather than the license. The teams that waste the most money buy seats first and then discover the data was never going to arrive on its own.