Metabase Community Edition: free credits and offers
Best offer on record: Metabase Open Source / Community Edition — free, unlimited, self-hosted. 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Metabase Open Source / Community Edition — free, unlimited, self-hosted high confidence
Perpetually free and unlimited: unlimited users, unlimited questions & dashboards, 20+ supported data sources, MCP server, AI on your own model, unlimited transforms when self-hosted. License is AGPL (GitHub repo lists AGPL + commercial MCL files). No sign-up, no credit card, no region limits. You pay only for your own infrastructure (Docker/JAR on your host). No support, backups, or managed upgrades — those are what the paid/cloud tiers sell.
Eligibility
Everyone — no .edu email, no startup-age or funding-cap requirement, no application process.
How to claim
Self-service: deploy the official Docker image from Docker Hub or download the JAR and point it at your database (metabase.com/start/oss). Alternatively 'Get started' on the homepage routes to the paid cloud checkout at store.metabase.com/checkout.
Expiry
None — perpetual, no renewal, no sunset date stated.
Gotchas
Free edition excludes commercial features (SSO, required 2FA, row/column permissions, auditing, white-label embedding are Pro/Enterprise-only). No included support: 'All of Metabase's plans include support' means support is a paid-bundle item; self-hosters use community forums/discourse. Hidden cost is your hosting, not Metabase. AI is 'on your preferred model' (BYO) in the OSS path, so LLM API costs fall on you.
Metabase Cloud 14-day free trial (any plan: Starter / Pro / Enterprise) high confidence
14-day free trial of Metabase Cloud, available on any plan. Starter is $100/mo ($90/mo billed yearly, $1,080/yr; 5 users incl., extras $6/user/mo); Pro is $575/mo ($517.50/mo yearly, $6,210/yr; 10 users incl., extras $12/user/mo); Enterprise custom, 'from $20,000/yr'. Cloud trial includes automatic backups/restore/upgrades, managed PostgreSQL (AWS RDS), preconfigured SMTP, SSL, SOC 2 Type II, multi-zone HA, unlimited engineer support by email. Homepage CTA: 'Try Metabase Cloud free'.
Eligibility
Open; no student/startup criterion mentioned. Trial is time-limited (14 days), presumably for new accounts. Regions at signup: US East, Frankfurt, São Paulo, Singapore, Sydney (changeable later).
How to claim
Sign up via the 'Get started' / 'Try Metabase Cloud free' button, which routes to https://store.metabase.com/checkout; pick a hosting region at signup.
Expiry
Trial ends after 14 days; continued use requires conversion to a paid plan. No renewal of the free period is stated.
Gotchas
This is a TRIAL, not a free tier — there is no perpetual free Metabase Cloud plan. The official page does not state whether a credit card is required for the trial; checkout goes through a store, so card capture is plausible but unconfirmed. Usage-based extras after trial: AI (Metabase-hosted) $3.75/1M tokens with 1M tokens included; Transforms 1,000 runs included then $0.01/run (Advanced $0.02 BI / $0.01 EA); storage first 1M rows free then $2/1M rows. Data-residency limits: only the 5 listed regions; air-gapped or HIPAA needs go to self-hosted/Enterprise.
Education / student program — does not exist medium confidence
No student or education license is offered. metabase.com/education and metabase.com/startups both return HTTP 404. The pricing page, homepage, cloud page, GitHub repo and blog index contain no education discount, .edu requirement, or student offer. The only 'free' paths are the perpetual OSS self-hosted edition and the 14-day Cloud trial.
Eligibility
N/A — program not found; nothing to claim.
How to claim
Nothing to claim. Students use the same free OSS self-hosted edition (unlimited users) as anyone else.
Expiry
N/A.
Gotchas
Absence confirmed on the official site today, but 'no program' cannot be guaranteed if one were announced off-site; the free OSS edition is the de facto student offer (no .edu email needed, no seat caps — unlike typical SaaS student tiers that cap seats or features).
No dedicated free Cloud tier with limited questions/users currently exists on the official site — the 'known so far' item (Metabase Cloud free tier, limited questions/users) appears to describe either the 14-day trial or a plan that was never a perpetual free tier; as of 2026-10-22 the free offerings are only (a) the unlimited self-hosted OSS/Community Edition and (b) the 14-day Cloud trial. No 2025-2026 sunset of a student or startup program was found: /education and /startups are 404 and no pricing-change or program-anniversary posts appear in the blog index (closest historical posts: 'Announcing Metabase Cloud' and 'An Enterprising Opening'). Caveat: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so third-party/press cross-checks of 2025-2026 changes (e.g., plan renames, tier limit tweaks) could not be done; confidence in absence-claims rests solely on the official pages fetched today. The OSS repo README describes the cloud offering strictly as a 'free trial', with no perpetual free tier.