Microsoft revealed more details about Power BI Premium at their recent Ignite conference. I covered the initial announcement here but it’s now in General Availability so we now have details on the pricing and licensing.
Availability
April 2, 2021
Pricing
A full license will be $20 per user per month
For customers with Power BI Pro (standalone or as part of E5), it will be $10 per user per month
This Microsoft page has more information on this plus the new features coming to Power BI Premium in general – including vCore auto-scaling charged via Azure PAYG.
Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2020, Power BI Premium has a new “per-user” licensing model. Previously available only via a “capacity” model, at a pretty high price point, this new licensing option will make it more cost effective for companies to get started.
The main reason I talk to people about Power BI Premium is licensing. With Power BI Pro, EVERY user consuming a dashboard need a Pro license – which can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. Power BI Premium per Capacity removes the need for each user to be licensed with Pro meaning, even with it’s high monthly cost, it can work out more cost-effective for heavy use cases.
While there have been feature differences between Pro & Premium, they’ve not been a reason for these conversations – now however, it looks as though that Microsoft hope that may change. This new licensing model makes it easier, and cheaper, for smaller orgs and teams of developers to access the high-end Power BI Premium features. Perhaps this is an effort to compete further with Salesforce Tableau et al.
To access content in a “Premium per-user workspace”, each user must have a “Premium per-user” license so the licensing, in a nutshell is:
If you want to get access to the additional Premium features for named users, Premium per user (PPU) is the way to go.
If you want to allow unfettered access to dashboards without worrying about per user licensing, Premium per capacity is still the answer.
Getting access
Whilst in preview, Power BI Premium per-user will be free of charge. Regarding eventual pricing, Microsoft said in their announcement:
Premium per user will be uniquely affordable and highly competitive among individual user offerings in the industry. Stay tuned for the official pricing announcement as we get closer to the GA timeframe. I guarantee you won’t want to miss it.
The “further details” link below has a well moderated comments section which features several answers from Microsoft clarifying some of the common questions too.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 