Power BI Licensing Change

As of June 1, 2017, there is a Power BI licensing change coming…

The quick summary is that Power BI free is going to gain the ability to automate refresh via a personal gateway, but will lose the ability to share dashboards. It's moving more to a "personal" experience. The new licensing model is essentially changing the free vs paid barrier from automating refresh to sharing.

Microsoft is extending the Power BI Pro trial out to a year, which is great. So if you do share pro content, your audience will be able to say "try pro" for up to a year before they need to buy in to a pro license.

In addition, there is going to be a new Power BI Premium feature that allows much better scalability for large companies.

I'd go into more details on this, but to be honest, my friend Matt Allington has done a fabulous job of summarizing the changes (both good and bad) on his site (and article that is well worth the read.) You can find that article here: http://exceleratorbi.com.au/power-bi-licences-changes-good-bad/

8 thoughts on “Power BI Licensing Change”

Jeff Weir on May 4, 2017 at 7:56 pm said:

Great price point for the big guys. Irrelevant to anyone else. Wrote up an analysis at http://dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2017/05/04/to-powerbi-premium-or-not-powerbi-premium/ if you're interested.
sam on May 8, 2017 at 6:50 am said:

@Ken - "but will lose the ability to share dashboards" - does this mean share as a public we link- that would be a real shame
Ken Puls on May 8, 2017 at 2:51 pm said:

@Sam, you won't be able to share dashboards, but you'll still be able to share a report as a public link, (or embed it in a web page) so far as I'm aware.
sam on May 13, 2017 at 12:59 am said:

@Ken - The only difference between a Dashboard and a Report is Q&A - is not available in Reports and only in Dashboards - Am I right ?
Ken Puls on May 15, 2017 at 9:35 am said:

@sam no, not exactly. Dashboards do have Q&A, yes, reports don't. Dashboards can have multiple visuals from a variety of reports, and are the tools we use to share our insights with others.

Basically, the dashboard is about sharing. If you don't want to share, then you probably don't need one.
Molly M. on May 15, 2017 at 1:50 pm said:

Essentially, the subscription price will be the same for users that are modeling and designing dashboards as for users that just want to look at them. $10 per head. Unless you are large enough that you can spend over $5000/mo for the premium unlimited plan. As a small business, we had been investing in building PowerBI Skills, and been promoting its use to our nonprofit clients. We are willing to pay a reasonable subscription for a "power" user. But data consumers are not power users and should not be subscription based. This is going to kill our use of the product.
sam on May 16, 2017 at 5:49 am said:

@Ken - I feel a Dashboard is more restrictive as It seems it can have only one slide.
A report can have multiple.
Report can also be shared via a File - Publish to Web. On a dashboard we seem to have the option to share to specific people of the same domain
So my question is are we going to loose the ability to share a Dashboard or loose the ability to share a report as well
Mack on May 16, 2017 at 11:15 am said:

So, much for Microsoft democratizing data! As a consultant who works with small mom and pop shops, removing the sharing to free accounts is disappointing. Especially, when they touted their sharing capabilities as a way to lure customers away from their competitive set. While I understand the business decision, I can’t help but feel played into switching from Tableau only to find the grass is not greener on the other side.