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SendTidings vs Looker Studio.

One is free and ubiquitous. The other costs £29 a month and does one specific thing well. Here’s when each makes sense — including an honest case for when free wins.

Pick Looker Studio if

You’re happy to build, brand, and maintain a dashboard per client — and you actually do. You enjoy DIY tooling, your stack is mostly Google (Analytics, Ads, Sheets, BigQuery), and your clients are comfortable opening a link to view live data.

Pick SendTidings if

You want a monthly report to arrive, not be built. You’d rather pay £29 a month than spend two hours per client setting up and maintaining a custom dashboard you have to babysit when something changes.

Side by side

Where the two diverge.

  SendTidings Looker Studio
Price £0 (1 site), £29/mo (25) Free
Primary surface Branded monthly email Dashboard URL
Setup per client ~5 minutes 1-3 hours per dashboard (then re-styling)
Email delivery on a schedule Native (the product) Yes, but as a PDF attachment
Mobile rendering Designed for it Variable — PDF on mobile is rough
Multi-client tenancy Yes (org → clients → sites) No — each client is a separate file
White-label sender Starter and above You send from Gmail, manually
Integrations Plausible, GA4, Matomo, Cloudflare GA4 + many Google products + connectors
Open-source self-host Planned (AGPL-3.0) No (Google-hosted only)
The different angle

DIY tooling vs done-for-you tooling.

Looker Studio is a serious piece of software. It’s free, has deep Google ecosystem connectivity, and lets you build whatever you can imagine. The trade-off is that it’s a tool, not a product. You bring the design, the layout, the branding, the per-client setup, the maintenance. Every new client is hours of work before the first report goes out.

SendTidings is a product. It has opinions about what a monthly client report should look like, and it sends one for you. The trade-off the other way: you don’t get to redesign the email from scratch.

If you have one client and an evening to spare, Looker Studio is a legitimate free option. If you have five clients and don’t want to spend the next five evenings building dashboards, the £29 a month tends to pay for itself in the first hour.

When Looker Studio wins

Free really is free here.

  • You have one or two clients. The setup time amortises differently when it’s a one-off. Spending two evenings making a beautiful Looker dashboard is fine if it only ever happens twice.
  • You’re deep in Google’s stack. GA4, Ads, Sheets, BigQuery — Looker Studio integrates with them better than anything else.
  • You enjoy DIY tooling. Some agencies prefer the control. Looker gives you it.
  • Budget is hard zero. A small fee is a real barrier; we get it.
When SendTidings wins

The time you save is the value.

  • You have more than two clients. Per-client dashboard setup compounds. Multi-tenancy out of the box matters.
  • You want the report to be email, not a PDF. Native inbox-rendering — not an attachment your client won’t open.
  • You don’t want to maintain dashboards. Looker Studio breaks quietly when an integration changes upstream. SendTidings is one less thing to fix at 11pm.
  • Your analytics isn’t all Google. Plausible, Matomo, Cloudflare — Looker Studio can do some of these via connectors, with varying quality. SendTidings ships native support for each.

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