This is the Electe Review. Today, why the sticker price on business intelligence software is a distraction from the real bill. When vendors pitch business intelligence platforms, they lead with the monthly seat price. Microsoft Power BI Pro lists at $14 per user per month. Tableau Standard sits at $15. On paper, a 10-person team pays $140 to $150 a month. That number is neat, predictable, and largely incomplete. A recent analytics implementation analysis estimates that licensing accounts for just 30 to 40% of total cost. The remaining 60 to 70% goes to implementation services, internal staff labor, infrastructure, training, and maintenance. If your company needs to integrate 10 or more data sources, integration work alone can consume 40 to 60% of the implementation budget. A typical enterprise rollout can tie up three to five full-time employees for four to six months. Even historical benchmarks tell the same story. A 2018 analysis found minimal BI deployments required around $150,000 in license fees, while total ownership reached $265,780 for cloud and $328,080 for on-premises. Vendors often discount the license while leaving maintenance and support charges untouched. The pricing model itself determines how the meter runs, per user pricing charges by role, creators, explorers, and viewers, which penalizes broad company access. Capacity pricing bills for shared compute and storage, consumption pricing charges for data refreshes, processed rows, or AI analyses, making bills erratic when automated monitoring scales up. Tiered SAS plans bundle limits together. Elect, for example, charges 32 euros a month for starter with 90-day data history, and 40 euros a month for business with unlimited history, AI forecasting, and an AI agent with an 18% discount on annual billing. The real test is total cost of ownership per active decision maker over three to five years. A cheap license paired with messy sales records, inconsistent product names, and manual data cleaning still produces an expensive system. Before signing, demand written terms on usage allowances, connector fees, data retention limits, and onboarding costs. Compare what it costs to operate the platform, not what it costs to sign up. That's the review.