How much does a dashboard cost for a small business?

Most data consultancies answer “on quote”. That’s understandable: every company has its own tools and data. But a business owner needs a ballpark figure before picking up the phone.

We collected the prices that a few French providers and software vendors show publicly. Every amount below comes from a page listed at the end of this article, accessed on October 2, 2026. Prices change: check them before you decide. “Excl. VAT” means the price is shown before French VAT.

What you actually pay for

A dashboard costs three things, which are best kept separate in a quote:

The build: understanding your numbers, connecting your sources, building the dashboard, training your team. It’s a service, paid once.
Licences: the tool the dashboard runs on (Power BI, Looker Studio, Metabase…). They are paid to the vendor, often monthly.
Maintenance: sources change, and so do needs. It’s a recurring cost, or internal time.

Prices shown by service providers

Offer	Provider	Price shown
AI audit, paid online	Arborys IA	€240 excl. VAT
One-hour “SOS” session	BA-IT	€190 excl. VAT
Feasibility study, in 5 days	BA-IT	€2,900 excl. VAT
Power BI dashboards	AH Data	from €1,400
Simple Power BI reports	Datapilot	€8k
Power BI maintenance	Datapilot	from €600 per month
Outsourced data team	Datahoms	€10k per year
AI support, net of subsidy	Foxpilot	€6,000 excl. VAT out of pocket

Two lessons. First, the range is wide: the same word, “dashboard”, covers anything from a report on one spreadsheet to a project lasting several months. Second, entry offers (audit, study, one-hour session) cost between a few hundred and a few thousand euros: a good way to test a provider before committing.

Licences: often the smallest item

Vendors publish their prices. A few reference points:

Power BI Desktop is free for building reports. To share them, Microsoft lists Power BI Pro at €12.10 excl. VAT per user per month, billed annually.
Looker Studio, renamed Data Studio by Google in April 2026, is free for creating and viewing reports.
Metabase has a free open-source edition that you host yourself.

We compare these three tools in Power BI, Looker Studio or Metabase. For a small business, the licence rarely weighs more than the build.

What about hiring?

The other option is to recruit. According to Apec, the French executive employment agency, the median pay of managers in Big Data jobs, which include data analysts, is €54k gross per year (fixed and variable, 2025 edition). For that salary, the simulator of Urssaf, the French social contributions agency, gives an employer cost of about €76,800 per year for a manager, with its default assumptions.

Hiring makes sense when the workload keeps one person busy full time, all year round. For a first dashboard, it’s usually more than you need.

What drives the price

For the same tool, five factors explain most of the gap between two quotes:

The number of sources to connect: one spreadsheet or five applications.
Data quality: clean files, or years of entries to reconcile.
The number of metrics and pages.
Refresh frequency: monthly, daily, real time.
Training and documentation, included or not.

How not to overpay

Start small. A first dashboard on a single topic (sales, cash) teaches you more than a thirty-page specification.
Ask who owns what. The dashboard, the code and the access should belong to you, even if you change providers.
Separate licences from services in the quote, to compare like with like.
Require written definitions for every metric: that’s what prevents arguments about “the right number”.
Test before you commit, with a fixed-price entry offer.

At KAVDAL, our prices are public, on the pricing page.