Amazon QuickSight
Serverless business intelligence service for building and sharing interactive dashboards.
Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-09-09
Key facts
- 01Two user roles: Authors connect to data and build dashboards, Readers just view and filter them
- 02SPICE = in-memory engine; import a snapshot for fast repeat queries, or Direct Query to hit the live source
- 03Connects to S3, Athena, Redshift, RDS/Aurora, on-prem databases, SaaS apps, and uploaded CSV/Excel
- 04Built-in ML with no ML skills: forecasting, anomaly detection, and plain-English Q&A via Amazon Q
- 05Reality check: AWS renamed it "Amazon Quick Sight" under the Amazon Quick suite — exams and APIs still say QuickSight
Exam triggers
Phrases and scenarios that point here.
- "Dashboard", "visualize", "business intelligence", "charts for business users" → QuickSight
- Non-technical staff need to explore data without writing SQL → QuickSight
- Embed interactive dashboards inside your own app or customer portal → QuickSight embedded analytics
- Data already sits in S3 → Athena queries it, QuickSight draws it
Not this service
- Running SQL against data in S3 → Athena (QuickSight sits on top of it)
- CPU, latency, error-rate graphs for engineers → CloudWatch dashboards
- Storing and warehousing the data itself → Redshift
Use cases
- 01Weekly revenue dashboard on Redshift so leadership self-serves instead of asking an analyst for a fresh CSV every Monday
- 02Customer-facing analytics embedded in a SaaS product — "your store's traffic this month" — without building a charting stack in-house
- 03FinOps dashboards over Cost and Usage Report data in S3, so each engineering team sees its own spend without opening Cost Explorer
- 04Retail chain with hundreds of store managers on cheap Reader seats, all hitting one nightly SPICE snapshot instead of hammering the production database
- 05Anomaly alerts on business metrics — refund rate suddenly doubles — caught by built-in ML rather than someone eyeballing a report
How it's charged
- 01Per user per month by role — Readers are cheap (from $3/user/month), Authors cost much more; Admins bill at the Author rate
- 02Capacity pricing buys Reader sessions in bulk (a session is 30 minutes) — for embedded apps or audiences you can't predict
- 03SPICE is billed per GB-month above the 10 GB included with each Author, and capacity is per Region
- 04Billing surprise: a flat $250/month per-account infrastructure fee kicks in if you have any Pro user or enable Q&A topics
- 05Direct Query means the underlying source still bills you — a dashboard on Athena charges per scan on every page refresh; SPICE avoids that
