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Formulating scope and costings
[Personal discussion]
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly given the length of the email. I didn't want it to get much longer so I summed a few things up, which is likely why a few points ended up unclear for you. Arranging a call sometime soon may be easier to discuss more complicated aspects like licencing.
Here is the tableau pricing page for reference https://www.tableau.com/pricing And in response to your questions:
1). Tableau Server is a cheaper hosting option (5 USD/user/year versus 2 for Tableau Online) but we would then need to configure and manage cloud infrastructure to run it on as well. With greater security and performance risks as it won't come with the same optimisations Tableau have for their own server.
Alternatively we could host on Tableau Public Server which has no hosting or licencing costs. The limitations here are 1) The visualisations will have an unremovable branding bar for tableau as shown here: https://www.breedorant.com/project-page 2) There is only basic performance as it is a shared server - so we would want to do a stress test first given the high volume of geospatial data. I'm creating an example dashboard with a single LGA (and no quantative data) to get an idea of performance; I'll send you a link once it's up. If you don't mind these issues with Tableau Public, it is a far cheaper alternative and no more difficult to develop for.
Some other options beyond Tableau for you to google would be:
- Microsoft's Power Bi - approx k annually
- Domo - costs unlisted but it is enterprise scale and I've heard priced similarly
- Plot.ly - k annually I would suggest that Tableau is the most functional of these tools however.
The final option is I develop a custom webapp for this project. This would approximately double the development hours, but with minimal ongoing hosting costs annually and greater flexibility to add or expand the tool in future.
- I prefer working closely with my clients and giving them regular updates on how the dashboard is evolving. In these updates I'll include current and projected hours so you can keep tabs on the cost. This way we can get a product that better matches your needs.
- You would only need two licences for Tableau Online. However Tableau Server has a 5 licence minimum and I am waiting on confirmation whether this restriction applies to Tableau Online too. One licence represents one user login; so we would have one login for development in our end, and one login which would be used by all web users.
Total cost would be:
- $ 1,600 AUD max for development time
- $ 420 USD for half of Tableau development licence
- $ 2,520 USD with Tableau Online 5 licence minimum OR $ 1,008 USD if Tableau are willing to waive the minimum. All tableau costs can be excluded if we can develop for tableau public despite the limitations I discussed in 1).
You are quite right - Tableau is prohibitively expensive and definitely not small business, or even small department friendly. The business I'm working on with my former colleagues is based on building custom webapps since the ongoing costs can be so heavily reduced. Even for your case a custom tool could be built for ~$ 3.5-4k AUD, but with an annual cost of $ 300 thereafter. Let me know if you are interested in this option.
Feel free to respond direct to the email, otherwise I've set up a slack team we can use here: https://join.slack.com/t/geo-development/shared_invite/MjMyNDU2MjI0ODY5LTE1MDM4MzY3MjQtM2QwNWE3ODVlZQ
Look forward to hearing from you.
Cheers, Joshua
Thank you for your very detailed message. I do have a few points/questions:
- Yes, I think in the first instance the development would be for the Tableau design and initial configuration of Tableau Online. What other options would there be beyond this out of curiosity?
- Regarding the 40 hours, thats sounds fine. But if you come in under, please let me know…
- As for the licenses. They are rather steep aren’t they. The development license is ok and we could split that as you say.
The Tableau Online arrangement appears great on the surface but it is quite a large cost and is not really catering for small businesses if I may state the obvious. Am I right in saying that it would be $2,520 a year? How many licenses would I need? And secondly, what is the difference between a license and a user? I just got a little confused on your second last paragraph. Another thing that I didn’t quite follow was the total cost. Would you take half the Tableau Online cost too? I couldn’t quite follow how the project cost went from $5,800 to $3,385.
Yes, Slack sounds good. I’ve never heard of it, but I shall look it up!
If you could come back to me on these items, that would be great!
Cheers, Paul
[Personal discussion]
...
So back to the project and my original questions. A web-hosted tableau dashboard makes sense given the work you've previously shown me, and now is quite timely as it's only in the last six months Tableau has added the kind of mapping functionality required for your project. Tableau has a significant amount of web support and we can definitely configure a website to only use one Tableau account for all visitors. In fact my current role is predominately to develop custom reports for our webapp using tableau; and we've managed to group several hundred business users down to 3-4 tableau user accounts.
Reading through the brief again while I was away it was a bit clearer what you intended - and your examples are even better. I've done some basic research into multi-level Geospatial data in Tableau and with a bit of clever design we should be able to limit the data it processes at time, ala your "scale dependent renderer" concept. A limiting factor is that this would need to be driven by explicit filters and/or interacting with the other graphs - Tableau has no concept of scale or zoom level as Geo data is a second class citizen to pure normalised data in its world. I've worked around these problems before though and with some tweaks to your draft design we can definitely achieve a slick, responsive dashboard.
Assuming I get your go-ahead I will create a mock-up Dashboard, and design the data schema/ transformations required. Based on previous projects, and assuming I'm only responsible for tableau design and initial configuration of Tableau Online, my estimate would be 40 effort hours (with a timeline spread over multiple weeks) composed as follows:
[8 hours] Data transformation - Uploading your provided data, converting it into a schema that Tableau can efficiently project, and early testing of potential performance issues. This would be the stop/go point of the project to give us confirmation Tableau is the right tool for the dashboard you require.
[8 hours] Non-Geo Development - Initial dashboard setup and creation of the non-map graphs plus detailed data table. Setting up interlinked filters and confirming we can display both the map and the graphs from the same dataset without any technical issues.
[16 hours] Mapping development - Creation and integration of the multiple map views. I'd expect this to be a highly iterative process - even though Tableau can visualise all the data, we still need to make sure that it is responsive enough for web use. The standard for web design is 2 second load times to maintain user engagement, so we will need to balance quality with speed.
[8 hours] Web development - Tableau Online configuration plus website embedding. This will be spread among the other stages as we want to do all testing on the web, not complete the dashboard then find out it fails to load. I'm assuming here that you have a site already available to embed the tableau dashboard.
From your original files it seems that you've already completed the analytics component yourself, so I would be charging a pure Tableau Developer rate of $40/hour. This would put the minimum cost for the project at:
$1,600 AUD developer time - As detailed above; plus your licencing costs of: $840 USD for Tableau Developer licence - billed annually and required to develop the dashboard for upload to Tableau Online $2,520 USD for Tableau Online - billed annually and required on-going to host dashboards online (I've tried several alternatives for my own projects to circumvent needing this but it is too tightly locked down)
To further explain the Tableau costs: Tableau online is $42 USD/User/Year and we only required two licences (Production/Test) however the standard lock-in minimum is 5 users for a licence as costed above. I've already emailed Sales to confirm whether this minimum has changed recently as Tableau has long been experimenting with their pricing. Ideally we could get the Tableau Online cost down but I have not yet received a response. Additionally I am willing to pay half the Tableau Developer licence cost, if you are willing to transfer it to me to use on other projects once this project is complete and signed off. Together this would bring the total project cost from $5,800 AUD to $3,385 AUD.
As we're getting into the nitty gritty detail of the project it will be useful to have a proper chat as well as share what we are working on. My recommendation is Slack, with voice calls and screen sharing. I use it for several projects with people here and back in Australia and have found it a great replacement for Skype messenger. Let me know if you're happy to sign up for it (it's free) otherwise I can use any other client you prefer and we can arrange a call sometime soon.
Cheers, Josh