Metabase Pricing 2026: Open Source, Pro & Embedded Costs

Metabase pricing is more transparent than most BI software, but the headline numbers do not tell the full story. Open Source is genuinely free to license. Starter begins at $100 per month. Pro costs $575 per month. For embedded analytics, the bigger question is how many authenticated end users you will have.

Quick answer: how much does Metabase cost in 2026?

Metabase Open Source is free to self-host. Starter costs $100 per month with five users included. Pro costs $575 per month with 10 users included. Additional users cost extra, while Enterprise uses custom pricing and starts around $20,000 per year.

For SaaS companies, authenticated embedded users can count as paid Metabase users. Guest embeds do not require an account for each viewer, but they have a more limited interaction model.

Metabase pricing at a glance

Plan	Monthly price	Included users	Extra users
Open Source	$0 license	Unlimited self-hosted users	$0 license
Starter	$100/month	5	$6/user/month
Pro	$575/month	10	$12/user/month
Enterprise	Custom, from ~$20k/year	Custom	Custom

When paid annually, Metabase currently discounts Starter to approximately $90/month and Pro to $517.50/month.

Enterprise terms vary, particularly for large embedded deployments.

Is Metabase really free?

Yes. Metabase Open Source is free to download and self-host.

That makes it one of the more attractive BI tools for technical teams that need internal dashboards without buying a commercial BI license.

But free software and zero total cost are not the same thing.

With self-hosted Metabase, your team owns:

servers upgrades backups monitoring security patches incident response the underlying database and data stack

If you already have this infrastructure and engineering capacity, Open Source can be excellent value. If you need a managed production BI environment, the cost of operating the free edition should be included in the comparison.

This is why we would not describe Metabase Open Source as a pricing trick. The license is genuinely free. The trade is operational responsibility.

Metabase Starter pricing

Starter costs $100 per month and includes five users.

Each additional user costs $6 per month.

Starter is aimed at teams that want Metabase Cloud without operating the application themselves.

At 15 users:

$100 base + 10 extra users × $6 = $160/month

At 50 users:

$100 + 45 × $6 = $370/month

Those are still relatively modest numbers for managed BI.

The limitations are more important than the price. Starter is not the tier designed for advanced authenticated embedded analytics, deep governance or the full set of enterprise controls.

Metabase Pro pricing

Metabase Pro costs $575 per month and includes 10 users.

Each additional user costs $12 per month.

This is the tier many SaaS teams need to evaluate because it unlocks capabilities relevant to customer-facing analytics, including authenticated modular embedding, advanced permissions, SSO and more complete white-labeling.

Here is how the user math works at list price:

Authenticated users	Estimated Pro monthly cost
10	$575
25	$755
50	$1,055
100	$1,655
250	$3,455
500	$6,455

The calculation is simple:

$575 + $12 for each user above the first 10.

That is not necessarily the price a 500-user embedded customer should accept. At high volumes, Enterprise and custom pricing become relevant.

But the table demonstrates an important commercial fact: the $575 Pro headline is not the final bill if large numbers of authenticated customer users receive Metabase accounts.

Metabase Enterprise pricing

Enterprise is sales-led and starts around $20,000 per year.

The main reasons to move from Pro to Enterprise are not simply "more dashboards."

Enterprise is designed around larger organizations that need stronger support, procurement help, custom contracts, single-tenant or air-gapped deployments and commercial terms that make more sense at scale.

For a SaaS company with hundreds or thousands of customer-facing analytics users, Enterprise should be part of the conversation because list-price per-user Pro math may stop being practical.

Ask Metabase to quote your actual embedded audience rather than extrapolating indefinitely from $12 per user.

How Metabase billing works for users

Metabase bills based on active user accounts.

A user account can count toward billing even if the person does not sign in frequently. Deactivating an account stops it from continuing as an active paid user after the applicable billing period calculation.

This matters for SaaS products.

A customer who opens analytics twice a month may still need an authenticated Metabase account if your product uses authenticated modular embedding or full-app embedding.

That is different from a session-based pricing model such as Amazon QuickSight capacity.

Metabase embedded analytics pricing

Metabase now has two important embedding paths: guest embedding and authenticated embedding.

They should not be lumped together.

Guest embedding

Guest embeds work on all Metabase plans, including Open Source and Starter.

The viewer does not get a Metabase account or session. Your application signs the request, and locked parameters can restrict the data displayed.

This makes guest embedding useful for dashboards and charts where viewers mainly consume a prebuilt experience.

Because no Metabase user account is created, guest viewers do not count as additional paid users.

The trade-off is functionality. Guest users do not get the same self-service capabilities as authenticated users.

Authenticated modular embedding

Authenticated modular embedding requires Pro or Enterprise.

Each end user needs their own Metabase account. Metabase explicitly warns against sharing accounts because permissions and session tokens need to remain secure.

These accounts count toward billing.

In return, authenticated embedded users can receive a much richer analytics experience, including self-service features, permissions, drill-through, query building and AI chat.

That distinction is central to Metabase pricing for SaaS.

Does Metabase support embedded AI?

Yes.

This is worth stating clearly because older comparisons may say otherwise.

Metabase supports embedding AI chat as part of its modular embedding capabilities. Authenticated self-service AI experiences require the appropriate paid plan and user setup.

Metabase's broader AI functionality is also more generous than some older pricing articles suggest. AI features are available across plans, with teams able to connect their own supported model provider. Metabase Cloud can also provide managed AI consumption.

If you are evaluating AI analytics, verify the current provider and token billing setup rather than assuming there is a mandatory separate AI seat.

Metabase pricing examples for embedded SaaS

Scenario 1: simple customer dashboard with guest embedding

A SaaS company embeds a read-focused dashboard using guest authentication.

Because customers do not get individual Metabase accounts, the viewer count does not create the same per-user billing pattern.

The company still needs to pay for the selected Metabase plan and its own infrastructure if self-hosting.

This can be a very cost-effective setup.

Scenario 2: 50 authenticated self-service users

Assume the company needs Pro because customers should explore data and use authenticated self-service features.

Pro includes 10 users.

40 extra users × $12 = $480

$575 + $480 = $1,055/month

That is still reasonable for many B2B applications.

Scenario 3: 500 authenticated customer users

490 users above the included 10:

490 × $12 = $5,880

Base Pro = $575

List-price math = $6,455/month

At this point, you should not treat the list-price calculation as the final procurement answer. Ask for Enterprise/custom embedded pricing.

The scenario does show why audience scale needs to be modeled before launch.

Metabase Cloud vs self-hosted pricing

Starter is the straightforward managed-cloud entry point.

Pro and Enterprise can be used in cloud or self-hosted configurations.

The license price alone does not determine which deployment is cheaper.

Self-hosting may make sense when:

your organization already has platform engineering capacity data residency requires it you need a specific infrastructure model you want deeper operational control

Cloud can be cheaper in total effort when you would otherwise need engineers to run upgrades, backups and monitoring.

For most pricing comparisons, estimate both:

vendor bill + internal operating cost.

Hidden Metabase costs

Metabase is relatively transparent, but a few costs sit outside the plan card.

For self-hosting, infrastructure and engineering are the obvious ones.

For paid cloud deployments, usage can also appear in areas such as storage, transforms or managed AI depending on your setup.

The underlying data stack matters too. Metabase is primarily an analytics and visualization layer. Many companies still need a warehouse, ELT pipelines and data modeling.

None of that is unique to Metabase, but it explains why a free BI license can coexist with a five-figure analytics stack.

When Metabase is very good value

Metabase is hard to beat when you need affordable internal BI and your team is comfortable with open source or managed cloud.

It also remains competitive for simple embedded dashboards, particularly when guest embedding covers the use case.

The economics become more nuanced when a SaaS product needs hundreds or thousands of authenticated, self-service users.

That is the point where the billing model becomes part of product COGS rather than simply an internal software subscription.

Our Metabase alternatives guide covers products that use different commercial models.

Metabase pricing compared with Luzmo

Metabase started as an internal BI product and has expanded significantly into embedding. Luzmo was designed around customer-facing embedded analytics.

Luzmo's Embedded Everywhere plan starts at €1,995 per month billed annually, with platform plus adoption-based usage.

For a small internal data team, Metabase Open Source or Starter is much cheaper and may be the better fit.

For a SaaS product, the comparison depends on what customers need to do.

If they only consume simple dashboards, Metabase guest embedding can remain very economical.

If hundreds of customer users need authenticated self-service exploration, compare the per-user Metabase economics with a platform built around external-user usage from the start.

See Luzmo vs Metabase for the product-level comparison.

Which Metabase plan should you choose?

Choose Open Source when your team can self-host and needs core BI without a license fee.

Choose Starter when you want managed Metabase Cloud for a small team and do not need Pro-level authenticated embedding or advanced governance.

Choose Pro when SSO, authenticated modular embedding, white-labeling and advanced permissions are central to the deployment.

Talk to Enterprise when the audience is large, procurement is complex or custom embedded economics are required.

The decision should be driven by the type of user experience you need rather than just the number of dashboards.

If the decision is really about what to put in front of customers, compare the options in data visualization tools for SaaS, the best analytics widgets for modern apps and our guide to building a report builder inside your app. For the market-wide view see embedded analytics pricing, and Luzmo publishes its own pricing.

Conclusion

Metabase pricing is straightforward at the plan level and more interesting at the user level.

Open Source really is free to license. Starter is inexpensive. Pro gives product teams access to much richer embedded capabilities.

The important question for SaaS is how viewers authenticate.

Guest embeds can serve large audiences without creating one paid Metabase account per viewer. Authenticated self-service users count toward billing, which means costs rise with adoption unless you negotiate a larger Enterprise arrangement.

Model that distinction before choosing the plan.