Lower Price Points for Power BI Premium

[blindeye]

Mention was made a couple of weeks back by the hosts of thePower BI Premium webinar of a lower pricing point than the currently advertised minimum of $4995 (US) / £3100 (GBP) per month costs for Premium use.

Any word on when these are likely to be announced? It would much more sense for us organisationally to have a single licence and be able to share content with external users, but to be viable for our needs (around 50 internal users and possibly 20 external ones but with the capacity for growth), the price needs to be at least 2/3rds cheaper to even be considered.

[agneum]

Suppose you have 600 people in your company which is a very reasonable size for considering to use the premium service. Out of those, maybe 300-400 have a power bi pro license, because not every single person in your organization needs it. At 10$ per Power BI Pro license, you are looking at 3000-4000$ for Power BI licenses.  You would need 500 people in your company (that actively use power bi pro) to simply price match Power BI Premium. Of course, you're getting the benefits HOWEVER, as I understand, having the Power BI Premium service is not enough, your users will STILL need licenses for power bi pro (unless you use P1 or aobve). So

Also consider, any mid-sized company is about 200-300 employees needs licenses along with the 5000$ a month. The price gap is just too large. Do you even know how many VMs, Servers, Storage accounts, App services, etc. etc. you can run in Azure for the cost of 5000$ a month? Certainly not 8 vcores and 25GB or RAM along which is the entry level price for PBI Premium. Just as a reference, 5000$ is the equivalent cost as  having 167 users with M365 Premium and the Power BI addon (20+10$). So if you have 300 users, you have to justify it as having  "+167" users, that is peaying 2/3 of what your typical expendature for office licenses.  CRAY-Z

[Anonymous]

@blindeye - new prices have been announced at the bottom of the webpage "Explore Pricing" here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi-embedded/ - go to the last page, take a deep breath and start thinking about peak page renders per hour.

When one of the staff members (Avive) originally posted the reasons to change from Embedded to Premium, he/she said that "Pricing is unpredictable when based on report loads". I beg to differ - pricing is clear but the selection of which price is just as difficult to determine as it was. In fact, there is no effective way to estimate costs using this peak load capacity structure without actually implementing it.

I understand that the price bands can be selected together - so you could move from EM1 to EM2 and then to EM1+EM2 and then to EM3 and to EM3+EM1, etc etc. However, it is not documented other than by someone in the forums.

Note the yearly commitment footnote.

Also, note the pricing calculator for Premium is now out of date.

[Anonymous]

Any update on this?

We're an SME (~100 staff) with 30 or so consuming PBI reports... we'd like some of the benefits of premium (more frequent refreshes, linked tables) but our business is not going to pony up $60,000 a year for it.

Come on guys... think about your huge volume mid market... give us a price point we can justify!

[kevhav]

+1 

My organization has several hundred users. We like Power BI, and we have O365 with Power BI Pro licenses. Nice! However, we want to publish (to the Power BI Service) datasets that are larger than 1 GB.

So, initially, I was excited to hear about Power BI Premium -- which would allow us to have larger datasets! And it adds sharing options we want, too -- like for external audiences. But then I was disappointed when I saw the price point! A single "P1 node" would suffice for us. But $5k per month is pretty far out of our budget.

[GilbertQ]

Hi @kevhav

Have you looked at using SSAS Tabular if your models are larger than 1GB?

Also have you had a look at what is taking up all the size in your data models? I am hopeful that there would be a way to reduce the size of the model, without having to loose the visuals and insights?

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@blindeye "If" they are going to do this, I would imagine the announcement would be made next week at the Data Insights Summit.

[MawashiKid]

"IF"... That is the question... There will be a session on Introducing Power BI Premium on June 12 at Microsoft Data Insights Summit... So "IF" Microsoft comes with "BIG NEWS SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENTS" I guess that would be adequate time... You can watch the broadcast live on https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/datainsightssummit/default.aspx ... I mean it's still an "IF" at this stage...