
Making Google Data Studio Free for Everyone - selmat
https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/02/making-google-data-studio-free-for.html
======
kyrra
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
Another complaint was lack of Postgres support. That was added a few weeks
ago.

[https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-new-google-
data...](https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-new-google-data-studio-
postgresql.html)

~~~
trhway
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
_Be careful with the data you send_

How exactly did this make it into a public Google release?

------
flaviuspopan
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
this. exactly this.

------
benjaminjosephw
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.

~~~
slap_shot
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
But who's to say that Google will never pursue this market too?

~~~
nowarninglabel
Google doesn't really excel at markets such as Looker's.

We happily pay for Looker and get excellent support from them.

It'd take many, many years of hearing success stories with Google before I'd
even consider moving off of Looker on to a competitive product by them and
even then the switching costs would unlikely to ever be worth it.

~~~
lmeyerov
Sort of how Google pays for a quantum computer while building a new one? ;-)
Today the Tableaus of the world grow the market, but I think they'll naturally
consolidate under bigger umbrellas.

I bet Microsoft is watching Google's moves here closely. Just as MS grew from
Excel to PowerBI and AzureML etc., Google's cloud initiative would naturally
grow from Spreadsheets to something like the above. Single-service startups
and even the Tableaus of the world may be temporary noise: the $xxB goal is
instead getting more gravity than AWS and MS for cloud data workflows. The
monopoly play is create good-enough analytics software, make it free on the
dimensions smaller companies like Looker charge for, and undercut by instead
bundling into overall Google/Azure/AWS deals. Commodify the market but get
more of it.

We looked into BI a few years ago for where we should leverage our
client/cloud GPU tech, and decided BI was an execution sprint to $100M and
then bail. So, while I wish the best to my (smart!) colleagues at Looker,
Periscope, MapD, etc., we decided to go another way. And... Worth mentioning,
we're hiring! ;-) build@graphistry.

------
cardosof
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.

------
apeace
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
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.

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

~~~
adventurer
"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
> 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.

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

~~~
nileshtrivedi
I could sign up just fine from here in India.

~~~
mohsinr
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?"

------
rrggrr
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
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)

------
johnmarcus
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
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:/...](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)

~~~
johnmarcus
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.

~~~
polartx
its an SSL connection, doesn't that mean its encrypted in transit?

~~~
jlgaddis
It's explicitly NOT SSL encryption.

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

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

------
obulpathi
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
Would it be easy to pump Cloud Datastore into Bigquery and then read from
that? (genuine question)

~~~
bduerst
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
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
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-
bigque...](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/streaming-data-into-bigquery)

~~~
obulpathi
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.

------
bmc7505
Not available in Sweden.

