Difficulty understanding QuickSight pricing

Question

I have a public, static website where I want to display embedded QuickSight charts.  My data are in s3.  I estimate the site will display around a dozen or so charts sprinkled across a few pages.  The site is initially a low traffic site, starting at around 50 unique views per day with it hopefully eventually ramping up to 1000 views plus per day.  I am the only developer.

I'm confused with the pricing model listed in the official [pricing page](https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/pricing/).  I have the following questions:
1. Do public embedded charts and/or dashboards require me to choose the enterprise edition?
2. Is QuickSight really built for public access?  Does each unique visitor count as a "reader?"
3. If the answer to the second question on #2 is yes, does this mean each visitor initiates a session?
4. Is QuickSight even appropriate for my use case?

Accepted Answer

The bulk pricing is indeed not appropriate for your use case, however the individual reader session pricing may be, but I suspect it is not.
The billing model for the basic embedded use is "Per user session" -- where a 'user' needs to be authenticated in some mannor (may be an anonymous user using cognito or other methods - but needs to be a user-authentication , e.g. using some standard authentication associated with humans logging in.
Cognito is a good fit for this.   User sessions are up to 30 minutes.  Max per-user-per month is $5.

If your 'visits' are from 'users' then this might work. However your use of the term 'view' and 'visit' suggests a more passive public site where people are not 'logging in' and my in fact be robots ('spiders').  This use case is not a good fit for Quicksight directly -- Quicksight is NOT a 'chart engine', 
quicksight is a full "Interactive BI Visualization tool" intended for significant user interaction (drill downs, cross-linking, persisting of previous views, per-user customizations etc).    Compared to traditional BI tools ("power BI", "Tableau" ) -- Quicksight has a much better pricing model and embedded experience.
But compared to 'charting libraries' like D3, Chart.js, google charts etc -- Quicksight is much 'heavier' and not a good comparison or fit.

So if the intent is ' a few charts spread over a public web site'  then the User Session concept and embedded QuickSight is not a good fit. 
However -- if what you need is static images of charts -- non-interactive, you certainly can use a single author role and generate as many charts as you like then export them to a graphic file to include in your web site.

However - once you hit a certian scale -- say 10s of thousands of interactive sessions  -- the "Capacity Pricing" model starts to be a very good fit, 
as you do NOT have to pre-define users at all.  You can have 1 million 'users' but pay only for the 1,000 that use the dashboards each month without having to know whom or even have any kind of 'login' or 'session'.

Answer

#1

Yes, you need to select the Enterprise Edition.

#2, 3

If you want to have public access without authentication as a QuickSight user, you need to purchase reader session capacity. For leader session capacity, you will be charged for each session issued, and for each leader plan, you will be charged for each leader.

#4

There may be situations where QuickSight lacks functionality and selects other BI tools, but I don't really think about whether it is suitable for large-scale or small-scale usage.

Difficulty understanding QuickSight pricing

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