Understanding the type of required license

[limor]

Hi, 

I am a developer at a very small company (5 developers total).

We are looking into intergerating Power BI into our solution, but we cannot understand what type of license is required for us, and what our costs will be.

We have a software product that uses Microsoft SQL Server 2012 as a data server, and an ASP.Net application that does the BI for the end users. We are would like to enreach our ASP.Net appliction with dashboards, reports, graphs that have an attractive user-friendly look and feel, and we hope to do that with Power BI.

The data source for the BI is queries to the SQL Server.

We sell our product in two main methods:

1. Per month license, in such case the users get access application hosted on our cloud server.

2. The user buys the application to be installed on a local server on the user site.

What type of license do we need and what type of license our clients will need?

The clients do not develop anything of their own, only consume the layouts that we provide in out app.

thanks!

[v-shex-msft]

Hi @limor,

For your scenario, I think free license + 'scheduled refresh' + 'publish to web' feature will be enough for your requirement if you want to spread your application.

Reference link:

Publish to web from Power BI

Configuring scheduled refresh

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[Anonymous]

I think it might be a little inadvisable to assume 'publish to the web' will be suitable here.  Publish to the web has no security associated with it, so for a lot of client based scenarios this would likely be problematic.  This would mean that your client data would be exposed to anyone who can sniff out the web URL.  I'm sure some clients would 'nope out' over that.

Depending on how many clients you have, you could look at Power BI Premium, then you would be able to host all of the reports and allow your clients to have access to the reports under the free license.  This would be suitable if you have enough clients to help you cover the cost.  Once you meet that minimum viable cost number, Premium would let you scale up and out where required.

[limor]

Thank you for your answer. You are right about your assumption regarding security, it is not a good practice for us to put the clients data where anyone can see it.

Regarding Power BI Premium, the costs are not something that we can afford.