ThoughtSpot Pricing 2024: How Much Does ThoughtSpot Cost?

When you need business intelligence and data analytics but don’t feel like dealing with enterprise tools like Microsoft Power BI or Tableau, there are not that many choices. And when your primary use case is embedded analytics, the number of good choices shrinks considerably.

One of the popular ways to do data analytics, data exploration, and visualization, especially for an embedded use case is ThoughtSpot. Launched in 2012, the idea of ThoughtSpot is to make data visualization available to everyone, regardless of their skill levels. 

But there is more to selecting a vendor than ease of use. Pricing is a major consideration too, and today, we’ll show you how much ThoughtSpot costs. Before we get into the pricing model, it’s important to understand that the core product has three main aspects.

What is ThoughtSpot known for?

In the BI world, ThoughSpot positions itself as the only AI-powered analytics platform built for humans.

One of the main attractions of ThoughtSpot is their AI-powered natural language generation, something they call SpotIQ. It promises to empower live analytics for the novice BI user. In other words, anyone can load up the app and get access to real-time analytics by asking a question in plain English. For example “what are the best Q3 performers in the sales team, sorted by closed pipeline?”

The idea is that the average user can read and drill down into data without knowledge of SQL and complex onboarding that comes with the average analytics tool. 

It connects to a large number of data sources, such as AWS, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse Analytics, Amazon Redshift, Databricks and many others.

ThoughtSpot Analytics

Unlike the rest of the ThoughtSpot plans, Analytics has fairly transparent pricing based on the number of users and the rows of data you’re using every month.

For $95 per month, you get 5 users and 5 million data rows, which seems a fair price compared to other data analytics giants. The problem with the pricing is that there is no value in between - you get 5 million rows in Team and 25 million rows in Essentials, which costs $1,250 per month.

The issue that many users have is that ThoughtSpot can run metadata queries on its own at night, racking up those rows as you sleep.

In other words, you will quickly run out of those 5 million rows, especially if you collect and analyze lots of data. There are multiple instances of users complaining about ThoughtSpot running too many queries and not caching data, which racks up costs quickly:

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All plans get the core features, such as natural language generation - the ability to ask the app questions about your data and get answers and granular insights. You can visualize your data in all plans, including their version of dashboards, called Liveboards.

If you want to create dashboards and embed them, you need to purchase this plan first for your cloud data needs and then buy Embedded on top of that. In the end, sources such as Trustradius state that the average ThoughSpot user pays up to $30,000 per year.

ThoughtSpot Embedded/ThoughtSpot Everywhere

For the business user who wants to create and embed dashboards in their product or website, this is the ThoughtSpot plan to look at. Unlike the typical analytics platform like Tableau or Power BI, this app puts a huge focus on the embedded aspect. This means that it’s easy to use and set up (via the API) but also, super easy for the end-user to get actionable insights.

When it comes to pricing, there are two main plans: Pro and Enterprise. Neither of them has costs displayed on their website, so you have to get in touch with sales to find out how much you will pay.

The lower plan has up to 5 billion rows of data while the Enterprise one has unlimited data rows. We talked to a lot of existing and potential Luzmo customers and did some research on our own to find out that this is exactly the problem with ThoughtSpot pricing.

You are charged for every indexable query that the end-user opens in their embedded dashboard. We heard clients with query-heavy dashboards who ended up paying about $5-6 to open up a single dashboard for a single user. The more the customer analyzes their data sets in ThoughtSpot self-service analytics, the more it ends up costing.

So, your bill could be hundreds of dollars for every day of use. This consumption-based pricing means that you cannot predict how much it will cost per month to run the ThoughtSpot product. You do get unlimited users, but no one can predict how much they’ll tinker with their dashboards on a daily or monthly basis.

To be completely transparent - Luzmo offers consumption-based pricing too. The main difference is that you can very accurately predict how much that consumption will be based on the number of users and dashboards you have. We don’t run queries in the background that will make your monthly invoice go sky high.

ThoughtSpot Mode

The last part of the ThoughtSpot offer is built for data analysis teams that want a code-first tool for interpretation. This feature set was added to ThoughtSpot in 2023, when they acquired Mode Analytics.

You can use Mode to do ad-hoc analysis by writing AI-assisted code to answer any questions your team may have. It’s essentially self-service reporting but just for your analytics team - not your wider team or end-users.

No matter if you want to analyze the data in SQL, Python or R, and no matter the data model you’re using, Mode helps you get answers to questions about your data.

You can get the Studio plan of ThoughtSpot mode for free for up to three users, but it’s very limited. You only get 10MB per query too. To unlock all the features, more storage space, and API access, you have to upgrade to a paid plan, which does not have clear pricing.

Some online sources state that the most affordable Mode plan starts at $300. However, if you have a capable team of data engineers and analysts, this may not be a necessary cost for your monthly invoice.

If ThoughtSpot pricing is not a good fit for your team…

At Luzmo, we can offer an embedded analytics setup that has transparent pricing you can understand. Our embedded plans start at $995 per month, which gets you 100 dashboard viewers.

You also get consumption-based pricing for self-service analytics - but the key difference is that you can determine how much it will cost every month. Luzmo does not run queries in the background, racking up your invoices as you’re sleeping.

You know what you get with each pricing plan and you always get what you pay for.

On top of that, we have an AI chart generator that allows you to get actionable insights by asking Luzmo questions in plain English. We’re also API-first, which will make your developers happy. You can connect a variety of data sources easily, and build a deep integration between your embedded dashboards and existing tech stack.

Last but not least, Luzmo is extremely customizable. You can change the dashboard design, widgets, language, currency, time zones and more, so it caters to the individual needs of every end-user.

How much does ThoughSpot really cost?

The only real answer is - we don’t know because it depends on your use case and usage. The main takeaway is that aside from the Analytics plan, everything else is not transparent or predictable. For an embedded use case, you rely on your end-users to determine your monthly invoice because every activity in the app costs you a certain number of credits.

If you want an embedded analytics tool that is easy to set up and use and most importantly, has transparent pricing, check out Luzmo. You can visit our pricing page and you’ll see exactly how much Luzmo costs. Or you can talk to our sales team to learn more about how we can help you.