Amazon Web Services Rolls Out Pay-Per-Session Pricing

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the unit of Amazon, announced Thursday (May 31) that it rolled out pay-per-session pricing for Amazon QuickSight, its cloud-powered business analytics service.

In a press release, AWS said QuickSight enables anyone within a company, regardless of skill, to create visualizations, perform ad hoc analysis and get business insight from the data. With the pay-per-session pricing plan, any user can have read-only access to the data-driven dashboards of QuickSight and only pay when they access the dashboards. Pay-per-session pricing for QuickSight dashboards start at $0.30 per session, up to a maximum of $5 per user per month, Amazon said in the press release. What’s more, with pay-per-session pricing, there are no upfront costs, annual commitments or charges for inactive users.

Dorothy Nicholls, vice president of Amazon QuickSight said, “With highly scalable object storage in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), data warehousing at one-tenth the cost of traditional solutions in Amazon Redshift, and serverless analytics offered by Amazon Athena, customers are moving data into AWS at an unprecedented pace. What’s changed is that virtually all knowledge workers want easy access to that data and the insights that can be derived. It’s been cost-prohibitive to enable that access for entire companies until the Amazon QuickSight pay-per-session pricing — this is a game-changer in terms of information and analytics access.”

According to AWS, the volume of data that businesses create each day makes it hard for companies to extract value from it. Making it easy and inexpensive for all users, regardless of technical skill, will help the company make well-informed business decisions. The company said the cost and complexity of traditional business intelligence solutions prevent most companies from making analytics ubiquitous throughout the organization. For companies with tens of thousands of users that have a mix of access pattern, it results in either over-provisioning and paying for access they don’t use, or under-provisioning and preventing many users from accessing insights.

Meanwhile, AWS said smaller organizations with tens or hundreds of users lack the scale to justify the large upfront costs of traditional BI licenses. And, though some solutions offer monthly or annual subscriptions, these still require customers to pay full price even for infrequent users.

Anthony Deakin, Chief Advisor of Critical Risk Management at Rio Tinto, said in the same press release, “At Rio Tinto, safety is paramount, and we want to empower everyone to make decisions with the best data available. Amazon QuickSight allows our analysts to create insightful dashboards quickly for our critical risk management programme, enabling us to move from static spreadsheets to interactive data. However, rolling out these dashboards at scale to the field was going to be costly and complicated. We asked AWS for a better solution, and they listened. Readers in Amazon QuickSight, with pay-per-session pricing, will help us scale the dashboards to more end users across the world and only pay for what we use.”