The price is expensive but if I'm charging $100 - $150 / hr and it takes me twice as long to do something in PowerBI that it does in Tableau, Tableau quickly pays for itself for the desktop software. Then you can multiply that across a team of experienced BI professionals and even the product team because they can easily view workbooks and give feedback. That would easily outweigh the costs of Tableau Server.
Looking at their pricing ($500/user/year) seems pretty reasonable for such a high-impact role. If you're at a company, the question is if it saves you ~5 hours in a year.
It absolutely does. I know what life was like before Tableau (MS Excel + webquery, custom highcharts, cobbling together graphs from multiple SaaS services, custom python+R code) and I can say it probably saves 5 hours in a day or two.
That is not a adequate comparison. You aren't done after you bought the software. You need someone to set it up as week and that cost scales with the quality of the software you bought. You need to look at the cost you have once everything is said and done.
