Plans and what is gated

Start with what is not gated, because it is the opposite of what people expect from a BI tool:

• There is no publish quota. Publish as many dashboards as you like on a free plan.
• There is no visibility gate. Private dashboards are available on every plan. They are not a paid feature.
• Viewers are free and unlimited. You pay per editor seat. Nobody who opens a link costs you anything, on any plan.
• Sharing, version history, folders, workspaces and the URL are not gated.

A free account can publish, share, keep private, version and organize an unlimited number of dashboards.

What is gated

Four things, and they are all downstream of one idea: reading your own warehouse on a schedule is the paid product.

Gated	What happens without a paid plan
Creating a warehouse connection	refused when you try to create it
Setting any cadence other than manual	refused, with "a paid plan is required to schedule automatic refresh"
Refreshing on demand	refused, with one of the two messages below
Refresh failure alert emails	not sent

The on-demand refusal comes in two wordings, because the two cases have different payers. On a personal dashboard you are the payer, so it says:

Refreshing on demand requires a paid plan.

On a workspace dashboard the payer is whoever connected the data source, who may be someone else entirely, so it names them instead:

This dashboard's data source is on a plan that no longer includes refresh. The member who connected it needs an active paid plan.

If you see the second one, upgrading your own plan will not fix it.

Setting a schedule back to manual is always allowed, on any plan. You are never locked out of turning something off.

A plan that is trialing counts as paid, so a trial exercises the whole product.

The effective tier

Your tier is not simply your own subscription. It is the best of:

• your own subscription, while it is active or trialing, and
• the best tier among any workspaces you are a member of whose subscription is active or trialing.

The consequence worth knowing: a free user who is a member of a paid workspace has that workspace's tier, and it applies to their personal dashboards too. Add someone to a Pro workspace and their own dashboards can refresh.

Where the check happens, and when

Three separate moments, checking three different people. Treating them as one thing is the most common misreading.

Arming a schedule checks whoever is setting it, once, at the moment they set it. It is a one-shot check. A dashboard armed while you were paid keeps its schedule after the plan lapses, and hits the run-time gate instead.

Creating a warehouse connection checks whoever is creating it, at creation.

Every scheduled run checks the owner of the data behind it: for a self dashboard, its owner; for a warehouse dashboard, the connection's owner.

That last one is the sharp edge for teams. On a workspace warehouse dashboard, the plan checked at run time belongs to whoever created the data source, not to whoever wrote the dashboard. A whole team's dashboards stopping at once is the signature of that person's plan lapsing. See Connections and scope.

What a lapsed plan actually does

This is the part worth reading carefully, because the fear is usually worse than the behaviour.

Nothing is deleted, and nothing fails.

• Your dashboards keep serving, at the same URLs, with their last good numbers.
• The schedule is preserved, not cleared.
• Each due run records a skip, not a failure. In the run log it reads as a lapsed tier; in the web app it renders as a neutral paused state with an upgrade link, never as a red failure.
• Because it is not a failure, the failure-alert machinery deliberately stays quiet. Instead you get one notice about the lapse, and one more when refresh resumes.
• On upgrade it just resumes. No reconfiguration, no republish, no re-arming. The next due run refreshes normally.

The one thing to watch for is that a paused dashboard looks completely fine. Nothing is red, the URL works, the numbers are plausible. They are just older than they look, which is why the lapse notice exists at all: it was the most common way to reach "why is my data old" with nothing anywhere reporting a problem.

Free users receive no failure alert emails, but a failure episode is still tracked, so upgrading in the middle of an outage alerts on the next failure rather than swallowing it.

Failure alerts

On a paid plan, the dashboard owner is emailed after N consecutive failed scheduled runs. The threshold is yours to set in Settings, from 2, 3, or 5; the default is 3.

What you get is not one email per failed run:

• one email when the threshold trips
• one reminder per re-alert interval while it stays broken, which is a week for anything up to weekly and one cadence period for slower schedules
• one confirmation when a run genuinely succeeds again

Alerts can be muted per dashboard from its schedule dialog. Muting leaves the episode state untouched, so unmuting during an outage does not retroactively fire a backlog.

A lapsed plan does not trigger these, and a lapsed-then-resumed dashboard does not count as a recovery. The recovery mail waits for a real refresh.

The badge

A dashboard published by an account on the free tier carries a small Dashies badge. It is removed on a paid plan, and it never appears on a members-only workspace dashboard regardless of tier. A public workspace dashboard is badged on the workspace's tier rather than the author's.

The tiers

Three: Free, Pro, and Enterprise. Pro is priced per editor seat, billed monthly or yearly. Enterprise adds SSO and SAML, SCIM provisioning, volume pricing, an SLA, and invoicing.

Current prices are on the pricing page, which is the source rather than this page: a price quoted here would be one more thing to keep true.

Next

Back to Core concepts, or on to the Quickstart that needs a paid plan.