Looker Studio Pricing 2026: Free, Pro at $9, and the Real Costs
Looker Studio, now renamed Data Studio, is free for creators and viewers. Pro is $9 per user per project per month. The bill that surprises people comes from the connectors and the data behind the reports.
Looker Studio is free. Google charges nothing to build reports or to view them, and that has not changed. What has changed is the name: Google now calls it Data Studio again, and the paid tier is Data Studio Pro at $9 per user per project per month.
Google’s published prices on this page were verified against Google’s Data Studio page and the Data Studio Pro subscription overview on 25 September 2026.
The short answer
Looker Studio, now renamed Data Studio, is free for everyone who builds or views reports. Data Studio Pro costs $9 per user per project per month and adds team workspaces, organisation-owned content and Google Cloud support. Only people who create or manage Pro content need a licence; viewers do not. Most of the real cost sits outside Google’s price list, in paid connectors and in the warehouse the reports query.
Looker Studio is now Data Studio
If you searched for Looker Studio and landed on a page called Data Studio, you are in the right place. Google’s own documentation now opens with “Looker Studio is now called Data Studio.” The product, the reports and the free tier carried over. The name went back to the one it had before 2022.
It is also a different product from Looker, Google’s enterprise BI platform, which is quote-only and costs far more. That one has its own Looker pricing breakdown.
Looker Studio plans and prices
| Plan | Price | Who needs it |
|---|---|---|
| Data Studio (free) | $0 | Anyone building or viewing reports |
| Data Studio Pro | $9 per user per project per month | People who create or manage content in Pro team workspaces |
| Organisation-wide Pro | Quote, billed per monthly active user | Large organisations, set up through Google Cloud sales |
Google bills a self-service Pro subscription monthly for every licence you buy, “regardless of whether or not those licenses are used.” Each subscription is tied to one Google Cloud project, which is where the “per project” in the price comes from. Two business units on two projects means two sets of licences.
What Looker Studio Pro adds
The free version already does the reporting. Pro changes who owns it and how it is managed:
- Organisation-owned content. Free reports belong to the person who made them. Pro content belongs to your Google Cloud project, so it survives someone leaving.
- Team workspaces and project-level permissions for managing content across a team.
- Google Cloud support, and security controls including customer-managed encryption keys.
Pro requires a Google Workspace or Cloud Identity organisation. A personal Gmail account cannot subscribe.
Who needs a Pro licence
Only the people who create, edit or manage Pro content. Google’s documentation is explicit that users who only view reports built in a Pro environment “don’t require a Pro license.” So a team of four analysts building for 200 readers pays for four licences: $36 a month, or $432 a year.
One exception worth checking: Looker customers get complimentary Pro licences, at least 1,000 of them. Google excludes Looker contracts signed after 1 August 2026 and Looker instances created after that date, so newer customers should not budget on it.
The costs that are not on Google’s price list
Free reporting does not mean free reports. The usual bill comes from three places.
Paid connectors. Google’s own connectors cover Google sources: Analytics, Ads, Sheets, BigQuery. Pulling in Meta, LinkedIn, HubSpot or most other platforms means a partner connector, and most of those are paid subscriptions. Supermetrics, one of the biggest, starts at €39 a month for three sources and one destination; the full breakdown is in our Supermetrics pricing guide.
The warehouse. Reports that query BigQuery run up BigQuery charges. A dashboard with many charts and many viewers can re-run queries often, and that bill lands on your Google Cloud account, not on Data Studio.
The preparation. Looker Studio can blend sources and compute new fields, but it is not built for cleaning data. Campaign names that differ between platforms, duplicates in a CRM export, a spreadsheet with merged header rows: all of it gets fixed before the data reaches the report, usually in Google Sheets, by hand, every week.
What a Looker Studio setup costs a real team
Three typical setups, per year:
| Setup | Data Studio | Connectors and data | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| One marketer, GA4 and Google Ads only | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| One marketer, adding Meta via a connector | $0 | Supermetrics Starter, €468 | €468 |
| Four analysts on Pro, 200 viewers, with a connector | $432 | Supermetrics Growth, €1,908 | about $2,500 before BigQuery |
Connector figures use Supermetrics’ published yearly rates, read 25 September 2026. The last row converts euros at roughly 1.1 dollars and excludes BigQuery query costs, which depend entirely on data volume.
Looker Studio alternatives by price
| Tool | Published entry price | Viewers | Where it differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data Studio | Free; Pro $9 per user per project per month | Free | Best with Google data; paid connectors for the rest |
| Power BI Pro | $14/user/month, paid yearly | Each needs a licence | Deeper modelling, Microsoft estate |
| Mammoth | Free plan, paid from $39/month | Free and unlimited | Cleans and joins the data before the dashboard |
The case for staying on Looker Studio is strong when your data is mostly Google’s and already tidy. The case for Mammoth starts when it is not. You connect your sources, clean and join them in one workspace, and publish the dashboard from there, with viewers free and unlimited on every plan. See Mammoth’s pricing page for the plans.
Looker Studio pricing FAQ
Is Looker Studio free?
Yes. Building and viewing reports in Looker Studio, now called Data Studio, costs nothing. The paid tier, Data Studio Pro, is $9 per user per project per month.
How much is Looker Studio Pro?
$9 per user per project per month, billed monthly for every licence in the subscription. Large organisations can instead buy an organisation-wide subscription billed per monthly active user through Google Cloud sales.
Do viewers need a Looker Studio Pro licence?
No. Only people who create, edit or manage Pro content need a licence. Viewers only need sharing permission on the report.
Is Looker Studio now called Data Studio?
Yes. Google’s documentation now reads “Looker Studio is now called Data Studio,” the name the product had before 2022. The reports, the free tier and the Pro subscription carried over.
Is Looker Studio the same as Looker?
No. Looker is Google’s enterprise BI platform with a modelling layer, sold by quote. Looker Studio, now Data Studio, is the free reporting tool.
