QuickSight reader pricing when registered but never signed in

Question & Answer
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1

Hi,

At our organisation we use QuickSight with SSO provided by Azure AD. To ensure a smooth UX we preregister users (with READER role) using the RegisterUser API. However, many of these users never actually sign into to QuickSight for various reasons. As such they never “finish” creating their account and the ListUsers API identifies them as Active: false.

My question is, under the new “Reader per user” pricing model which comes into effect on May 1st 2025, will these readers still incur a $3/month fee?

Thanks.

2

Hey @reporting

From my understanding - yes you will be charged for provisioned inactive users. We’re just going through the same process in my org and that was the advice we got from our AWS account team.

We’re waiting to switch to IAM Identity Center for provisioning QuickSight users (we also use AAD/Entra as our IDP, but with IAM Identity Center integration this will manage the JML (joiners, movers, leavers) process much better.

3

Hi @gavclark

Thanks for your response. I’ll also reach out to my AWS account team for similar confirmation.

Another question for you:

but with IAM Identity Center integration this will manage the JML (joiners, movers, leavers) process much better.

Could you please expand on this a bit? What makes this better for you? It is SCIM integration? What other benefits are there for your organisation?

Thanks.

4

Hi @reporting ,

No problem - it will enable us to manage our users / subscriptions easier.

We use a custom app (data.all) which uses the RegisterUser API too, but it does not de-provision them, we need to do that separately.

We’ve been using QuickSight for some time (~5 years) and have multiple AWS accounts each with a separate QuickSight subscription, I’m not sure whether SCIM was an option when we first set this up.

There are use cases where people in different teams need to develop QuickSight assets in multiple AWS accounts which means we’re paying for multiple licenses for the same user as they are separate subscriptions.

Using IAM Identity Center means that the user is registered once for the AWS Organisation and a single QuickSight license can access all the AWS accounts within that AWS Organisation.

For us, this is primary benefit - fewer subscriptions to manage and reduced licensing cost overall.

Hope that helps !

5

Hi @gavclark

Thanks for that. It’s really helpful.

Cheers.

6

Can you provide me a source for this information ?

Kind regards,
Koushik

7

Hi @Koushik_Muthanna

This is how I understood it from the QuickSight team (I can’t remember who offhand) .

We’re waiting for a feature to migrate our current account based QuickSight subscriptions to IAM Identity Center and will consolidate the subscriptions.

For example, we have 10 AWS accounts, each has its own QuickSight subscription and if a user creates QuickSight assets in 3 of those accounts , that is 3 author licenses.

If we consolidate our subscriptions at the payer account level and use IAM Identity Center for the identity and provision the QuickSight license at that level, then the author would only need 1 license but would be able to create QuickSight assets in any of the accounts within the same AWS Organisation. All of our AWS accounts are linked to a single root organisation.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood this - but I will check.

thanks
Gavin Clark

8

@gavclark ,
thanks for the details.

From our pricing page : Business Intelligence Service – Amazon QuickSight Pricing – AWS , consolidated billing applies only for Pro licenses .

When provisioned in AWS IAM Identity Center, Pro licenses offer consolidated billing across multiple AWS accounts associated with the same AWS payer account.

Kind regards,
Koushik