Hi @m0ltar ,
We appreciate your feedback! At AWS we are customer obsessed and work to accommodate any feedback we get.
Regarding the two separate plans, the Standard Edition is meant for individual users who would like to simply create analyses on their data. The Enterprise Edition (vast majority of our customers) is for organizations who need enterprise grade features such as row level security, embedding, and user permissions.
In the Enterprise Edition, Authors are monthly pay as you go. You can also receive a discount per author with an annual commitment (similar to Amazon EC2 reserved instances). The value of this is that you only pay for Authors you have added to your QuickSight account, no need to over index and get locked into a contract. If Authors are not logging in, simply remove them and lower your cost. Author prices increase slightly if you add QuickSight Q. There is a $250/month base for Q covering the extra resources needed to build the natural language and ML models.
Pricing flexibility extends to Readers. Customers can sign up month to month and pay only $0.30/session with a $5 max/month. Meaning, customers only pay for the sessions they use. No need to pre-provision and pay for users that infrequently or never log in. For a further discount, customers can provision capacity (# of sessions) instead of individual users (again, similar to Amazon EC2 reserved instances). These charges increase slightly per user or session if QuickSight Q is enabled. Economies of scale are built into the pricing as customers use more sessions as well.
Amazon QuickSight also has separate pricing for some features, so that customers who do not use them, can save money. Minimums exist to cover infrastructure needed to support these features, however they are largely usage-based. Paginated reports start at $500 a month. However, regular QuickSight dashboards include PDF scheduling at per session cost. Alerts start at $0.50 per 1000 metrics evaluated ($0.0005 per metric evaluated). This is also separated out to provide a large discount from the $0.30 standard session pricing. Both of these features also have economies of scale built into pricing as customers use them more.
SPICE (Superfast Parallel In-memory Calculation Engine) capacity is $0.38/month. This is pay as you go. SPICE capacity can be added or removed at any time. Every QuickSight account includes 10GB extra capacity per author and is pooled per account/region. Datasets using direct query do not count towards your SPICE capacity.
It seems that your concerns are mainly focused on the minimums for various functionality. I would like to discuss that further with you. I will be messaging you shortly to get your contact information.