7 ms·

Making Google Data Studio Free for Everyone

193 points by selmat 10y ago

kyrra 10y ago
Back when this product was announced and discussed on HN[0], one of the primary complaints was the 5-report limit that it imposed on free users. Having that lifted seems like it may make a lot of people happy. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415
- latimer 10y ago
  Another complaint was lack of Postgres support. That was added a few weeks ago. https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-new-google-data-studio-postgresql.html https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-new-google-data...
  - trhway 10y ago
    do enterprises [suppose to] use it? Both MySQL and Postgres connectors have this: "Notes Currently this connector does not support SSL. Be careful with the data you send. If you database is behind a firewall, you will need to open access to the following IP addresses so that Data Studio can access your database: 64.18.0.0/20 64.233.160.0/19 [... cut 10 other addresses ...] 216.239.32.0/19"
    - revelation 10y ago
      Be careful with the data you send How exactly did this make it into a public Google release?
benjaminjosephw 10y ago
It's really great to see useful software like this becoming freely available but I do sometimes worry about the effect big players like Google have on niche markets like this. Any company building products in this space are about to feel the squeeze as their potential customers instead pick the free option. Small products inside of a big company don't have to be independently viable. It seems like the natural conclusion to this setup, whether intentional or not, is that the big companies create monopolies in these niches by pricing out the competition. That's great for the consumer while everything's free and there are still alternatives. I'm not sure how this will play out in the long run though.
- bigtones 10y ago
  Similar could be said for Microsoft and their PowerBI tool.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  I feel like companies whose niche is tooling to analyze Google data are living on borrowed time as it is. I would assume that they would have some advantages beyond Google not being interested in their market, otherwise this kind of disruption seems inevitable.
  - anewhnaccount 10y ago
    I guess at least some of these types of companies are consultancy companies disguised as product companies? If that's the case they might not be affected too badly.
  - jstandard 10y ago
    There is some truth to this, however Google Data Studio can also hook up to Postgres and Mysql data stores making it a bit more than Google-specific tooling.
- slap_shot 10y ago
  It just comes down to specialization. The BI tools that succeed will be the ones that offer features that Google will never pursue. A perfect example would be Looker's LookML[0] - companies that don't need that sort of functionality will be fine with Google Data Studio. But if you need that functionality (and it is very, very nice) - you'll pay Looker. https://looker.com/ https://looker.com/
  - benjaminjosephw 10y ago
    But who's to say that Google will never pursue this market too?
    - nowarninglabel 10y ago
dewiz 10y ago
Great news but it is NOT for everyone. Only a small number of countries have access to it
- adventurer 10y ago
  "Sign up for free" You get up to 5 free reports. If you want to do this at a company level or larger teams, there is a link to contact sales.
  - Navarr 10y ago
    > To enable more businesses to get full value from Data Studio we are making an important change — we are removing the 5 report limit in Data Studio. You now create and share as many reports as you need — all for free.
obulpathi 10y ago
Awesome! Datastore connector, please!! Cloud Datastore is the ideal NoOps and Serverless storage solution for projects from small to large. It would be great if you can build a connector for it.
- rattray 10y ago
  Would it be easy to pump Cloud Datastore into Bigquery and then read from that? (genuine question)
  - bduerst 10y ago
    You can load *.info Datastore backups into BigQuery tables natively. You could probably write up a quick apps script to automate data refreshes it if you wanted. Still not the same as reporting directly from a live datastore though :)
    - obulpathi 10y ago
      That's exactly my issue. I have a crawler that collects data and stores into Datastore. I need to periodically scoop up the snapshots and export them into BigQuery, then run the visualizations. I want my visualization to be live and also don't want the overhead of scooping the data.
      - skybrian 10y ago
        Using App Engine, I schedule task queue tasks to insert rows into a BigQuery table on the fly [1]. It only works for inserts, though. [1] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/streaming-data-into-bigquery https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/streaming-data-into-bigque...
        obulpathi 10y ago
        Thanks! And yes, as you mentioned, the problem is that it works only for inserts. I use Datastore as my primary database. So requesting for supporting Datastore from Datastudio.
apeace 10y ago
What a blow to Amazon Quicksight! I was just saying a couple of months ago what a game-changer the Quicksight pricing would be[0]. Next time data visualization comes up for me, my first move will be to compare these two options and see if Quicksight offers any additional benefits over Google Data Studio. But I can happily say, I'll not have to have another conversation with my boss about adopting an expensive data visualization tool. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966351
- flaviuspopan 10y ago
  Quicksight has been frustrating to work with to say the least. Generic error after error with no debugging info, poor integration with Athena, lacks the ability to plot data more granular than hourly, and with a max limit of 4 decimal precision accuracy. I guess if you're in sales it could be fine, but nowhere near ready for any serious analytics.
- huy 10y ago
  While Quicksight is game-changing in their pricing and trying to disrupt the usually-overpriced BI market (the same thing it did very successfully with Amazon Redshift and data-warehouse market), as the other comment pointed out their product is still not up-to-par with existing ones. If you're looking for affordable BI platform for startup, check out Holistics [0] (note: I'm cofounder), we are very tech startup-friendly, and our pricing starts at $49/mo for up to 5 users. Our customers range from 3-person shop to 600+ person unicorn startup. [0] https://www.holistics.io https://www.holistics.io
flaviuspopan 10y ago
This is a good start, but for those not entirely embedded in the ecosystem, it's unreasonable to expect exposing a Postgres DB without SSL. I'll stick with Tableau for now.
- johnmarcus 10y ago
  this. exactly this.
johnmarcus 10y ago
Oh good, I was really looking for a way to insecurely ship all of my customers data to Google. This makes it super easy to lose all compliance controls I've worked years to build. A.K.A - They should have a hosted onsite version and, at the very least, not offer connectors without secure connections (like the postgres one). This tool is good for analyzing data already at Google (adwords, etc), but it is very poorly positioned to be useful for anything else.
- vgt 10y ago
  Well Data studio runs on bigquery, among other things. Bigquery is soc,hipaa, PCI compliant, and is a part of the larger security strategy for Google. See [0]. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper&ved=0ahUKEwi324mP0fTRAhVO7WMKHYbBCu0QjBAITTAF&usg=AFQjCNEHJl_VzzING5VEgDe1p0ycB6ycKQ&sig2=C0rJICaYlXuCIvr2_isjEg https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
  - johnmarcus 10y ago
    That doesn't protect the data in transit from my production database. Only a secure connection can do that. It also doesn't solve the problem that I don't want to ship my production data to Google, or anyone else really, in the first place.
    - vgt 10y ago
      Correct, cloud products and services are not useful for folks who are not cloud friendly :)
    - polartx 10y ago
      its an SSL connection, doesn't that mean its encrypted in transit?
      - jlgaddis 10y ago
        It's explicitly NOT SSL encryption.
mohsinr 10y ago
Not Free for Everyone, as it said, it is not available in your country! (Pakistan), looks like US only edition for now.
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago
  I could sign up just fine from here in India.
  - mohsinr 10y ago
    Sign up and checking out sample was also fine at my side. However it is when you try to select new Report/give data source ... then it says: Quote: "Data Studio is not available in your country. Would you like to be notified when the service is available?"
mohsinr 10y ago
Not Free for Everyone, as it said, it is not available in your country! (Pakistan), looks like US only edition for now.
cardosof 10y ago
Cool! it's working here in Brazil. As others commented, the lack of secure connection/need to expose corporate DBs will have many IT managers dismiss Data Studio. Hope Google adds secure connectors. I'm working with a client using Data Studio as viz and Google Sheets as source, and the marketing people love looking at both.
dgudkov 10y ago
Those who work with Data Studio -- how do you guys do ETL for it?
rrggrr 10y ago
Google used to really innovate. Google Fusion Tables was terrific early on, for example. Gmail, where to even start in showing it with praise. Google Data Studio overlaps Fusion Tables, Sheets, Chart Tools and dozens of products like Amazon Quicksight, BIME, Tabeau, Rodeo, etc. I'd have liked to see Google apply its UI to an accessible machine learning studio, democratize the tech, and really break some ground.
njx 10y ago
For those who want on-premise google analytics datawarehouse should use this http://www.infocaptor.com/google-analytics-datawarehouse.php http://www.infocaptor.com/google-analytics-datawarehouse.php
bmc7505 10y ago
Not available in Sweden.
openfuture 10y ago
I bet it's not 'free' for richard stallman

193 points by selmat 10y ago

kyrra 10y ago

Back when this product was announced and discussed on HN[0], one of the primary complaints was the 5-report limit that it imposed on free users. Having that lifted seems like it may make a lot of people happy. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415

latimer 10y ago
Another complaint was lack of Postgres support. That was added a few weeks ago. https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-new-google-data-studio-postgresql.html https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-new-google-data...
- trhway 10y ago
  do enterprises [suppose to] use it? Both MySQL and Postgres connectors have this: "Notes Currently this connector does not support SSL. Be careful with the data you send. If you database is behind a firewall, you will need to open access to the following IP addresses so that Data Studio can access your database: 64.18.0.0/20 64.233.160.0/19 [... cut 10 other addresses ...] 216.239.32.0/19"
  - revelation 10y ago
    Be careful with the data you send How exactly did this make it into a public Google release?

benjaminjosephw 10y ago

It's really great to see useful software like this becoming freely available but I do sometimes worry about the effect big players like Google have on niche markets like this. Any company building products in this space are about to feel the squeeze as their potential customers instead pick the free option. Small products inside of a big company don't have to be independently viable. It seems like the natural conclusion to this setup, whether intentional or not, is that the big companies create monopolies in these niches by pricing out the competition. That's great for the consumer while everything's free and there are still alternatives. I'm not sure how this will play out in the long run though.

bigtones 10y ago
Similar could be said for Microsoft and their PowerBI tool.
Godel_unicode 10y ago
I feel like companies whose niche is tooling to analyze Google data are living on borrowed time as it is. I would assume that they would have some advantages beyond Google not being interested in their market, otherwise this kind of disruption seems inevitable.
- anewhnaccount 10y ago
  I guess at least some of these types of companies are consultancy companies disguised as product companies? If that's the case they might not be affected too badly.
- jstandard 10y ago
  There is some truth to this, however Google Data Studio can also hook up to Postgres and Mysql data stores making it a bit more than Google-specific tooling.
slap_shot 10y ago
It just comes down to specialization. The BI tools that succeed will be the ones that offer features that Google will never pursue. A perfect example would be Looker's LookML[0] - companies that don't need that sort of functionality will be fine with Google Data Studio. But if you need that functionality (and it is very, very nice) - you'll pay Looker. https://looker.com/ https://looker.com/
- benjaminjosephw 10y ago
  But who's to say that Google will never pursue this market too?
  - nowarninglabel 10y ago

dewiz 10y ago

Great news but it is NOT for everyone. Only a small number of countries have access to it

adventurer 10y ago
"Sign up for free" You get up to 5 free reports. If you want to do this at a company level or larger teams, there is a link to contact sales.
- Navarr 10y ago
  > To enable more businesses to get full value from Data Studio we are making an important change — we are removing the 5 report limit in Data Studio. You now create and share as many reports as you need — all for free.

obulpathi 10y ago

Awesome! Datastore connector, please!! Cloud Datastore is the ideal NoOps and Serverless storage solution for projects from small to large. It would be great if you can build a connector for it.

rattray 10y ago
Would it be easy to pump Cloud Datastore into Bigquery and then read from that? (genuine question)
- bduerst 10y ago
  You can load *.info Datastore backups into BigQuery tables natively. You could probably write up a quick apps script to automate data refreshes it if you wanted. Still not the same as reporting directly from a live datastore though :)
  - obulpathi 10y ago
    That's exactly my issue. I have a crawler that collects data and stores into Datastore. I need to periodically scoop up the snapshots and export them into BigQuery, then run the visualizations. I want my visualization to be live and also don't want the overhead of scooping the data.
    - skybrian 10y ago
      Using App Engine, I schedule task queue tasks to insert rows into a BigQuery table on the fly [1]. It only works for inserts, though. [1] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/streaming-data-into-bigquery https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/streaming-data-into-bigque...
      - obulpathi 10y ago
        Thanks! And yes, as you mentioned, the problem is that it works only for inserts. I use Datastore as my primary database. So requesting for supporting Datastore from Datastudio.

apeace 10y ago

What a blow to Amazon Quicksight! I was just saying a couple of months ago what a game-changer the Quicksight pricing would be[0]. Next time data visualization comes up for me, my first move will be to compare these two options and see if Quicksight offers any additional benefits over Google Data Studio. But I can happily say, I'll not have to have another conversation with my boss about adopting an expensive data visualization tool. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966351

flaviuspopan 10y ago
Quicksight has been frustrating to work with to say the least. Generic error after error with no debugging info, poor integration with Athena, lacks the ability to plot data more granular than hourly, and with a max limit of 4 decimal precision accuracy. I guess if you're in sales it could be fine, but nowhere near ready for any serious analytics.
huy 10y ago
While Quicksight is game-changing in their pricing and trying to disrupt the usually-overpriced BI market (the same thing it did very successfully with Amazon Redshift and data-warehouse market), as the other comment pointed out their product is still not up-to-par with existing ones. If you're looking for affordable BI platform for startup, check out Holistics [0] (note: I'm cofounder), we are very tech startup-friendly, and our pricing starts at $49/mo for up to 5 users. Our customers range from 3-person shop to 600+ person unicorn startup. [0] https://www.holistics.io https://www.holistics.io

flaviuspopan 10y ago

This is a good start, but for those not entirely embedded in the ecosystem, it's unreasonable to expect exposing a Postgres DB without SSL. I'll stick with Tableau for now.

johnmarcus 10y ago
this. exactly this.

johnmarcus 10y ago

Oh good, I was really looking for a way to insecurely ship all of my customers data to Google. This makes it super easy to lose all compliance controls I've worked years to build. A.K.A - They should have a hosted onsite version and, at the very least, not offer connectors without secure connections (like the postgres one). This tool is good for analyzing data already at Google (adwords, etc), but it is very poorly positioned to be useful for anything else.

vgt 10y ago
Well Data studio runs on bigquery, among other things. Bigquery is soc,hipaa, PCI compliant, and is a part of the larger security strategy for Google. See [0]. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper&ved=0ahUKEwi324mP0fTRAhVO7WMKHYbBCu0QjBAITTAF&usg=AFQjCNEHJl_VzzING5VEgDe1p0ycB6ycKQ&sig2=C0rJICaYlXuCIvr2_isjEg https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
- johnmarcus 10y ago
  That doesn't protect the data in transit from my production database. Only a secure connection can do that. It also doesn't solve the problem that I don't want to ship my production data to Google, or anyone else really, in the first place.
  - vgt 10y ago
    Correct, cloud products and services are not useful for folks who are not cloud friendly :)
  - polartx 10y ago
    its an SSL connection, doesn't that mean its encrypted in transit?
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      It's explicitly NOT SSL encryption.

mohsinr 10y ago

Not Free for Everyone, as it said, it is not available in your country! (Pakistan), looks like US only edition for now.

nileshtrivedi 10y ago
I could sign up just fine from here in India.
- mohsinr 10y ago
  Sign up and checking out sample was also fine at my side. However it is when you try to select new Report/give data source ... then it says: Quote: "Data Studio is not available in your country. Would you like to be notified when the service is available?"

mohsinr 10y ago

Not Free for Everyone, as it said, it is not available in your country! (Pakistan), looks like US only edition for now.

cardosof 10y ago

Cool! it's working here in Brazil. As others commented, the lack of secure connection/need to expose corporate DBs will have many IT managers dismiss Data Studio. Hope Google adds secure connectors. I'm working with a client using Data Studio as viz and Google Sheets as source, and the marketing people love looking at both.

dgudkov 10y ago

Those who work with Data Studio -- how do you guys do ETL for it?

rrggrr 10y ago

Google used to really innovate. Google Fusion Tables was terrific early on, for example. Gmail, where to even start in showing it with praise. Google Data Studio overlaps Fusion Tables, Sheets, Chart Tools and dozens of products like Amazon Quicksight, BIME, Tabeau, Rodeo, etc. I'd have liked to see Google apply its UI to an accessible machine learning studio, democratize the tech, and really break some ground.

njx 10y ago

For those who want on-premise google analytics datawarehouse should use this http://www.infocaptor.com/google-analytics-datawarehouse.php http://www.infocaptor.com/google-analytics-datawarehouse.php

bmc7505 10y ago

Not available in Sweden.

openfuture 10y ago

I bet it's not 'free' for richard stallman