Last updated on January 24, 2018
*Update – October 2017* – This post is still valid but more options are now available. I have another post outlining the changes here.
On May 3, Microsoft announced sweeping changes to the pricing of Power BI by introducing a new “Power BI Premium” SKU. The announcement itself can be found here, and there a number of other related resources worth that I am listing here for convenience:
Distribute to large audiences with Power BI apps
Changes to Power BI embedded
Power BI Premium White Paper
Power BI Pricing
Premium pricing calculator
Introducing Power BI Report Server
Power BI Premium is intended to address deficiencies in the current pricing model primarily with respect to sharing content. In my opinion, the new model succeeds in this goal for the most part, but it leaves a significant number of customers behind, and it also leaves many unanswered questions. These problems need to be addressed for Power BI to succeed in its goal of bringing BI to the masses. Overall, I like what Microsoft is trying to do with this new pricing model, and with a few tweaks, I think that it can resonate.
First, we need to understand the new model, and to do that, we need to understand the former model and the need for Premium. Given that the former model (consisting of free and Pro licenses) has not been replaced (although it is changing significantly), we will refer to it as the original model, and when Premium is added to it, we will refer to that as the Premium model. The original model is still completely relevant moving forward.
The original model and the need for change
The original model is relatively simple, and relatively unique to the industry. Power BI users are licensed for either free or Pro features. If a report contains any Pro capabilities, any consuming user requires a Pro license. A free user can create a report that uses Pro features, but that same user will not be able to consume that report in the free service. This is a very important distinction to understand. The author of a report (using Power BI Desktop) could be a free user, use a Pro feature, and after deploying the report to the service, be unable to use it in the service.
Difference between free and Pro from a feature standpoint is no longer (as of this writing) available on the Power BI pricing page, however, prior to June 1, 2017 it is the list below.
Therefore, if a report is configured to be refreshed more than once per day, or even if the time of day is specified, or if the report uses on-premises data, then all users accessing that report require a Pro license. Given that Power BI is all about bringing Business Intelligence to the masses, when each one of those masses needs to pay $10/month, it tends to constrain adoption, particularly if a report’s audience is organization wide, and you are in a very large organization.
Report sharing is also relatively limited. Reports can be shared anonymously, which is insecure. Dashboards and their constituent reports can be shared either internally or externally, but they are read only. Finally, both dashboards and reports can be shared through Group workspaces (now app workspaces). Currently, Group workspaces do not allow for external sharing, but they are the preferred means of sharing. However, they too require Pro licenses, which constrains adoption. For the free user, anonymous and dashboard sharing are the only real options.
New model
The introduction of Power BI Premium aims to solve some of the sharing issues listed above, and therefore to help drive adoption. Premium capacity is an add on to a Power BI tenant (organization), and is different that free or Pro licenses which are assigned to users. An organization can purchase Premium capacity, and then a Pro user (this is restricted to Pro) can move or publish content to the Premium capacity. Once the content is in Premium storage, all users can utilize all the features in the dashboards and reports. Premium effectively removes all feature barriers from the reports.
Premium storage also brings many performance enhancements, such as the ability to refresh data up to 48 times per day (vs the previous 8), and the effective removal of data model size limits.
Without Premium, there are also several changes to the original licensing model. According to the May 3 Announcement FAQ on the Power BI community site:
“Beginning June 1, the free service will have capabilities equivalent to Power BI Pro. This includes the same 1 GB workbook size limit, up to 8 daily scheduled refreshes for datasets, and maximum 1 million rows/hour streaming data rate. We’re also providing access to all data sources, including those available through the on-premises data gateway. Peer-to-peer dashboard sharing, group workspaces (now called app workspaces), export to PowerPoint, export to CSV/Excel, and analyze in Excel with Power BI apps are capabilities limited to Power BI Pro.”
Therefore, after June 1, 2017, Pro features are effectively an addition to the free features, and the feature differences should be as below:
From the May 3, 2017 announcement:
“Going forward, we will improve the free service to have the same functionality as Power BI Pro, but will limit sharing and collaboration features to only Power BI Pro users.”
The only features that Pro will have that free will not are those that are related to sharing. The above feature list reflects that.
Power BI Embedded
Power BI Embedded is the way that developers can embed Power BI in their applications. Using Power BI Embedded, until now, developers build reports, deploy them to their Azure instance, and call them from their applications. End users do not need any sort of Power BI licenses, and the developers are charged per report “render session”. This charging model has been one of the criticisms of Power BI embedded in that it is very difficult to predict costs. ISVs are at the mercy of the end users viewing reports, and any measure that is put into place to curb these render sessions is by definition a disincentive to adoption.
The fact that Embedded runs in a different namespace than the core Power BI service is another, leading to differences between the capabilities of Power BI Embedded and the core Power BI service. For example, the current iteration of Power BI Embedded cannot use the On-Premises Data Gateway, which can be quite restrictive.
Power BI Embedded is changing to use the new Premium capacity model. ISVs will purchase Premium capacity, and serve reports to their end users from that space. There will only be a single namespace for all Power BI content.
What’s Good
Power BI Premium solves to sharing problem for organizations that want to distribute their BI assets across the organization. If organizations would be accessing on premises data, a key feature of Power BI for enterprises, the Pro license requirement has discouraged adoption. With Premium capacity, an report publisher can share content with as many users as necessary without worrying about licensing the target users. Even better, those target users can be external, further extending the reach of that content.
For large enterprises, this has the potential to turn Power BI from a niche solution to something that is used by everyone.
The changes to the original model also makes things clearer for report designers and publishers. These publishers can work with the full range of Power BI features while the report is being built, and while they are themselves using it. When it comes time to share the report to a wider audience, they can publish it to Premium capacity where anyone can access it. If the organization has not purchased Premium, then the original model applies, and all recipients will still require a Pro license.
On the Power BI Embedded side, switching to Premium capacity completely eliminates the unpredictability of the current model. The fact that the reports will be rendered from the core Power BI service means that it will be fully on par with other Power BI reports, and developers will be able to take advantage of the full spectrum of Power BI features as they appear in the service.
What’s not so good
If you are a large company, there is very little not to like with this new model. It was large organizations that felt most of the pain with the original model, and it is they that benefit most from the Premium model. In fact, in my opinion, they are the only ones that benefit from the Premium model. Well, they and organizations that have no sharing requirements. The issue here is cost.
The Premium pricing estimator can be found online, but at present, it boils down to this. The smallest block of capacity that can be purchased by an organization is “P1”. To publish content to Premium capacity, you must also have a Power BI Pro license. Therefore, the minimum cost of entry is $4,995 (P1) plus $9.99 (Pro) for a total of $5,004.99 per month. This is well out of the reach of most small to medium sized organizations. In fact, an organization needs to be larger that 500 users (and those would be active Power BI users) for Premium to begin to make sense from a licensing perspective. The model size limit removal and the increased refresh frequency are also compelling reasons to move to Premium, but it’s easy to see that Premium is only for larger organizations.
Compounding this issue for small to medium sized organizations is the fact that as of June 30, dashboard sharing has been removed from the free SKU of the original pricing model. Any dashboards that had previously been shared broadly to free users will cease to function as of the cut-off date. If Premium does not make sense for these organizations, then they do have the option of purchasing Pro for the consumer. To help ease this transition, Microsoft is offering a year’s worth of Power BI Pro to all active free users that signed up prior to May 3, 2017.
However, dashboards can be shared with external users, and it’s a pretty tall order to expect an external user to subscribe to Pro just to be able to read your report.
With Power BI Embedded switching to the Premium model, the ISV now needs to buy Premium capacity. Given that the entry price for Premium is so high, it is (in my opinion) out of reach of most of the services that would rely on it, not to mention those developers that simply want to get up to speed on it or do some testing. There has recently been some indications on the forums that the barrier to entry won’t be as high for developers, but even a figure as low at $600/month may still be too high for many to swallow.
Conclusions
Overall, I think that the Premium pricing model solves a problem that desperately needed to be solved. This approach opens the door to Power BI truly democratizing Business Intelligence and becoming almost as ubiquitous as Excel. The opening up of features to the free SKU and focusing the Pro SKU on sharing means less confusion for report designers.
Unfortunately, for the moment price stands in the way of that goal of many small-medium sized businesses. These businesses may be small in stature, but they are many in number. The removal of sharing from the free SKU actually represents a step backward for them. The floodgates have been opened for large businesses, but the stream has been dammed for smaller ones.
Fortunately, pricing is a simple problem to solve. My hope is that the entry point for Premium comes down to something that would make sense for even a 10-person company, and that the cost for developers using Embedded could scale with far more elasticity, starting at $0 to encourage investment. These changes would, in my opinion, truly set the stage for Power BI dominance.
Hi John,
You’ve done a nice job here explaining the technical changes but I think you’ve missed three market-vital points:
Firstly, a product only used by large organisations is exactly that. There is rarely customer-innovation, there is little sharing other than for solving bugs, and the vendor keeps the eco-system going. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, everyone, has run this model for decades.
Secondly, PowerBI’s ginormous advantage over all others was the ease of taking data, creating a visualisation, and sharing it. Fast, easy, and supported by an enthusiastic, creative, and generous community. I’ve seen it take hold and spark just like that again and again – especially in big companies. The forums include citation after citation about the same sequence.
Thirdly, the forums are filled with anguish. This wasn’t a change in SKUs and large-organisation-targeted pricing, this was a fundamental, immediate, and sudden crushing of a large slice of users. They won’t forget, and they probably won’t ever forgive. They will just move on to a more trust-worthy vendor (is there one?).
So Microsoft have made sharing an insurmountable pain and turned off a large slice of the contributing community. I don’t think Microsoft is ‘leav[ing] a significant number of customers behind’, I think they are dumping them.
As a consultant who works with small mom and pop shops, this is a disappointing announcement. They are now removing the one feature that you touted most against your competitive set and the reason I started using your product. While I understand the business decision, I don’t like the way they got me to switch from the product I was using before switching to Power BI. Makes me spitting mad, to think of all the money I wasted on dax classes and time I spent being your beta test!
[…] The Power BI Premium Pricing Model – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly | The White Pages. […]
I assume that the P1 Premium level is based on a dedicated Azure Scenario designed for what is effectively a “Private” instance in the Cloud. This would be useful for BIG implementatios with lotsa dedicated data and lotsa consumers (or potential consumers).
But for small or medium sized implementations where the amount of data would be smallish and refreshes 48 times a day far from necessary and with maybe a low-priced “Viewer-Only” license this could lead to a low-priced subscription model which would make MS money on the increased volume with the minimum of stress on their systems.
I get the distinct feeling that this Premium business is more about kissing up and getting into to large Corporations and less to do with capacity or performance.
Hopefully they will soon revisit this pricing model and keep PBI accessible to smaller and medium-sized implementations. Otherwise they will have really made a statement that MS in the future really only cares about big corporations. This would be a BIG story.
Completely agree with Andrew, Mack, DMoffat…
Even if Microsoft will come up with ISV/SME friendly pricing model, and i REALLY, REALLY hope so (for power bi embedded), the very brutal wound in the trust will be left… How can I trust such a vendor that can out of a sudden skyrocket pricetag? This is such a high risk for my business, the risk I didn’t predict until recently…
Not taking the side of MS, but I don’t think it is too early to say that MS is “dumping” SMEs. There may be other lower tier SKUs to be released in the future (which we can only wonder or speculate when) and that MS is still observing how the community reacts to their surprise. 🙂 After all, if they want to get a bigger slice of the cake they must offer something a lot better than their competitors.
[…] New Power BI SKUs and Features […]
The ideal scenario for our customers is to introduce a premium model option tied to the number of reports or tiles published to the SharePoint page. A lot of customers are 100-300 staff with SharePoint online intranets and in some cases only 1-5 web parts showing daily sales figures for example. £3,100 per month for premium is too high.
“For large enterprises, this has the potential to turn Power BI from a niche solution to something that is used by everyone.”
I would like just 1 cent for every unused BI tool license bought under this premise. It would make me very wealthy indeed. For large organisations, the reality is most staff just want to do their allocated work – no more, no less. Many just use canned reports direct from operational systems or emailed reports. I find the true penetration of BI tools in an organisation to be more like 1%. So if the value point is 500 active users then an organisation needs 50,000 staff to make Premium worthwhile – although there will be many that get it regardless.
Microsoft have to compete a lot harder with the likes of Cognos and Business Objects in the Enterprise space. They would have a better chance with BI by stealth but a $5000/month starting point does not lend itself to small prototyping/proof of concepts with gradual ramp up.
[…] can and does quickly change prices. In 2016 after Brexit results Azure raised prices up to 22% and in 2017 after enough market share had been gained, significant Power BI licensing model changes were […]
I am a bit confused. I have a website I want to embed power BI reports.
I am the only report author, but around 10 users who may access 50 reports per month.
I do not need to store any data in power BI , my data set is small and I am happy to do live queries against by DB i.e not data refreshes.
What licence and how many do I need?
[…] The Power BI Premium Pricing Model – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly […]
I am the original author of the post in the PBI community mentioned here. I just found out that DirectQuery is NOT available for the entry-level Power BI Premium that has been promised. A fact that has been conveniently omitted for the past months. At this point I can only conclude that Microsoft is acting in a malicious manner.
pmdci – I’m not sure where you’re getting that information – that’s not true at all. According to Aviv Ezrachi – the PM for Power BI Embedded, “PBIE works with direct query through all SKUs A1-A6”.
John, It would be great if you updated this article to clarify Power BI Embedded for Azure and the ‘A1-A6′ capacities’, as well as the EM1-3 capacities. It seems to me that since the workspaces are defined in Azure Portal for the A1-A6 capacities, and in Power BI Portal for the EM1-3 and P capacities, it will require extra work to change from A to anything else? I can see using the A1-6 capacity for low usage scenarios, but why else would someone use A1-6 over EM1? Also if using the ‘Power BI Embedded for Azure ‘ offering, do we lose the benefits of the Power BI Portal? I can see MS has made efforts to clear up confusion, but I remain confused.
Hey Marcel – I have another more recent post that goes into detail here – http://whitepages.azurewebsites.net/2017/09/understanding-the-power-bi-capacity-based-skus/. I’ll update the body of this one too – good feedback.
Handmade Cotton Keyboard