Metabase Pricing 2026: Every Plan, and What 25 Users Cost

Metabase pricing starts at zero, and for a lot of teams it stays there. The open-source edition is free with unlimited users, as long as you host it yourself. The paid cloud plans are Starter at $100 a month and Pro at $575 a month, and both grow per user from there.

Metabase’s published prices on this page were verified against Metabase’s pricing page on 25 September 2026.

Metabase plans and prices

Yearly billing saves 10%. Starter and Pro come with a 14-day free trial, and you can host either one yourself or let Metabase run it in its cloud.

What each Metabase plan adds

Open Source is the full query and dashboard tool: point-and-click questions, SQL, AI-assisted questions, 20+ database connections and unlimited dashboards. You run the server, the upgrades and the backups.

Starter is the same software with Metabase running it, plus email and chat support with a three-day response target. Most teams buying Starter are buying the hosting, not features.

Pro is where the governance lives. Row- and column-level permissions, SSO, caching controls, usage analytics and auditing, white-labelling and multi-tenant embedding all start here. If you need a sales rep to see only their own region, you need Pro.

Enterprise is, by Metabase’s own description, the same software as Pro. What changes is a dedicated success engineer, a one-day support SLA, procurement help, air-gapped deployment and pricing built around your business model.

What Metabase costs for 10, 25 and 50 users

Per-user fees are small, so the plan choice moves the bill far more than the headcount does. Yearly billing throughout:

Starter: $1,080 plus $65 for each user past five. Pro: $6,210 plus $130 for each user past ten. Excludes usage fees and taxes.

Twenty-five people on Starter cost less than $200 a month. The same 25 on Pro cost $680 a month. So the real question is whether you need anything on the Pro list, and the answer is usually yes once dashboards leave the data team.

The usage fees on top

Metabase lists optional metered charges on top of the plan. Each comes with an allowance, so a small team may never see them:

• AI: most teams bring their own model API key. Metabase’s own AI service is $3.75 per million tokens, with the first million included.
• Transforms: 1,000 runs included on Starter and Pro, then $0.01 a run, billed monthly. Self-hosted instances run them free on your own servers.
• Storage for uploaded spreadsheets and CSVs: the first million rows are free, then from $2 per million rows.

Who counts as a Metabase user

This is the line on the pricing page that decides most bills. Metabase states that “both your internal team developing analytics and users of your embeds accessed through your product count as users.”

Inside a company, that means every manager who opens a dashboard is a seat, not only the analysts who build them. For a product team embedding dashboards for customers, every customer login is a seat. At $130 a year each on Pro, 500 embed users adds $63,700 a year, which is usually the point where teams start an Enterprise conversation.

The hidden cost of free Metabase

Open Source costs nothing to license, and it does cost something to run. Someone has to own the server, the database Metabase stores its own settings in, the upgrades and the backups, plus whatever happens when one of those fails on a Monday. That is engineering time, and it rarely shows up in a pricing comparison.

The other cost is what Metabase assumes about your data. It queries a database and charts the result. If your numbers live in spreadsheets, exports and SaaS tools that disagree with each other, the joining and cleaning happens somewhere before Metabase, usually in SQL written by the one person who knows it.

Metabase alternatives by price

If Metabase’s per-user model or its reliance on a clean database is the problem, these are the nearest options, with prices read from each vendor’s own page on 25 September 2026:

Mammoth sits closest to Metabase’s free viewers and furthest from its SQL-first workflow. Viewers are free and unlimited on every Mammoth plan, and the data preparation happens in the same workspace as the dashboard, so it suits teams whose problem starts before the database. Metabase is the better fit when your data already sits clean in a warehouse and your team is comfortable in SQL. See the whole plan list on Mammoth’s pricing page.

Metabase pricing FAQ

Is Metabase free?

Yes, if you host it yourself. Metabase Open Source is free with unlimited users. The paid plans start at $100 a month and add hosting, support and, on Pro, permissions and SSO.

How much does Metabase Pro cost?

$575 a month, or $6,210 a year billed yearly, with 10 users included. Each extra user is $12 a month or $130 a year.

Does Metabase charge for dashboard viewers?

Yes. Metabase counts everyone who uses it as a user, including people viewing embedded dashboards in your product. Open Source is the exception, because it has no user fees at all.

What is the difference between Metabase Pro and Enterprise?

Metabase says there is no feature difference. Enterprise adds a dedicated success engineer, a one-day support SLA, air-gapped deployment and custom pricing, starting at $20,000 a year.

Does Metabase have a free trial?

Starter and Pro both come with a 14-day free trial.