Row-level security & user attributes
Looker's user attributes are the legitimate selling point for governed BI — but you can do the same thing in the warehouse for free, and not pay it as a platform-tier upsell.
What people actually say
✕Advanced governance, granular access control and multi-region support sit behind the Enterprise/Advanced platform tier — roughly $132,000/year versus $66,600/year Standard, so row-level security effectively comes with a six-figure platform-fee bump.
Source: Shearwater Data, Looker Pricing Breakdown ↗✕Vendor breakdowns flag that anything beyond a baseline deployment lands in the sales-led Enterprise tier where pricing is opaque — 'call sales' is the only quote mechanism for advanced governance features.
Source: Holistics, Looker Pricing 2026 ↗✕User attributes are powerful but proprietary to Looker — they don't transfer to any other tool, so the access model gets re-implemented from scratch if you ever migrate.
Source: Valiotti Data, Looker Two Years After Google ↗
Row-level security lives in Postgres RLS policies or warehouse roles (Snowflake row access policies, BigQuery authorised views) — driven by the same SSO claims your app already issues. The rules are SQL in your repo, not a Looker user-attribute table you can't export, and the governance tier isn't a separate SKU.