Power BI Embedded A0

[Anonymous]

Hello,

Can Microsoft please consider introducing an A0 level tier for Power BI?

We've been using A1 for over a year and do not max out the capacity at all. We're most likely going to drop the product entirely since ~$1000/mo is just not feesable and is costs the same as all of our other Azure expenses.

Thanks,

Nick

[Anonymous]

Estimate usage for A1 is 700 dollars p/m and this is based on max usage 24/7, so I have no idea how are able to reach 1000+ but that is besides the issue. Have you considered using the capacity APIs to turn off the PowerBI service when it is not being used? 

https://docs.microsoft.com/ja-jp/rest/api/power-bi-embedded/capacities/suspend

[Anonymous]

It's about $950 CDN dollars which is the same as the figure you quoted in USD.

Pausing the service would be ideal, but the service needs to be up for reports to be viewed. Ideally the service would be started every hour or so long enough to produce the reports with the latest data then paused until needed again.

The problem is that it needs to be running 24/7 to view the results - regardless of when it was "refreshed".

[Anonymous]

I can only help you further by telling you what we are doing at this point. We run an automated task, every 10 minutes, that checks for activity in the last 2 minutes, if none then the service shuts down. Starting the service back up will take approximately a minute and rendering/loading the report will take anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 minutes depending on the speed of PBI. Every second PBI runs but is not being used, you are wasting money.

Our customers are mostly local, meaning nobody is going to use the reports at night, meaning we won't have to pay for the service during the night. If you have customers all around the globe that use the reports truely 24/7 then I'm not sure if this approach will be of any use to you.

If u expect heavy usage numbers then u might want to consider to up the timer to for example every 30 minutes check the last 10 minutes. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your response.

Our clients are global so it needs to be up 24/7 even though the usage is very low.

Even if MSFT offered a way to pre-purchase A1 VM's used by Power BI that would help, but that isn't an option either.