What happens after the trail period of Microsoft Fabric

[Hennie1234]

Hi,

I was wondering wat happens after the trail period of Microsoft Fabric? The license seems to be a F64? I don't want to run into unexpected costs after the trail period. And If I cancel trail period is everything cleaned up? Or how do I clean up everything?

Hennie

[germo]

I am fine with payed licenses and to promote this to customers. I will not buy a license for my own, as a freelancer, private person and developer, for 300 € per month. That means, I can't just develop, as I can do with SQL Server. But this could be OK, because my development normally is related to specific projects for specific customers. The paied nature just prevents me from develop outside a customers context.

And when I can obtain experience only inside customer projects, but not on my own capacity, then it is even more important to get my work under source control. For now this works already for Power BI, under some "coming soon" I can read, there is something on the road map. But it is not yet available. I tried the VSC extension for synapse. Currently it is too limited and has less features, then the cloud editor. Source control is only in the description of this extension. It doesn't work as of now, as it should or could work.

Now my risk is: Should I invest a lot of time to try to find a way to migrate a customers solution into fabric? Fabric is not feature ready, I am not sure, if at the end of a trial period there is enough stuff to motivate a client to switch from using a trial capacity to a paid license. What should I do, if not? I would have spent a lot of time, but I will lost all my stuff, which I can't save for later: Pipelines, DWH definitions, Notebooks,... all, what is not yet under source control. It is great, to have this on the road map. But I need solutions for the time, when trial periods will end. Otherwise it is very risky, to spent my unpaid time into fabric development. I want to use fabric, I want to promote it, but not at the risk to lose my stuff, in case the customers are not yet ready to pay at the trials end. Because in this project I am not paid for time, but only for possible success.

Currently I can't even develop at the specific customer in fabric, because I was able to create a test capacity at this customer, but I created it in the customers Power BI region. And I did not mention, that this region (West Germany) is not a supported region. That's why now the capacity exists, but can't be used. When I found out, that it doesn't work at this region (and it was hard to find out, that the wrong region is the cause of the issue) I stopped the test, hoping, the capacity will be deleted and can be recreated. Of course, this did not work. Now we have a capacity there, which can't be used, my trial is over, and I don't know, how now to promote a migration from on premise to fabric at this customer.

I was so excited by the marketing of fabric, but real life is more complicated and not so easygoing.

[Hennie1234]

I think there some good points here. I''m also a freelancer and I was used to work wih SQL Server developer edition and the last years with Snowflake, I could manage my usage because "pay what you use" not "pay as you go". It was still risky but manageable. And in Snowlfake you can create a trail account with no credit card or whatsoever. Now the cheapest SKU is about 300 euro/dollar per month. This is way too expensive for a freelancer to learn from Fabric. I do like to promote Fabric at my current customer but I need to upgrade my fabric skills in order to advise my current client. So there is a need for a cheaper SKU with perhaps a limited capacity but with full functionality to learn and experiment with Fabric.

[GeethaT-MSFT]

Hi @Hennie1234 Thanks for posting your question in Microsoft Fabric Community

After the trial period of Microsoft Fabric expires, you will need to purchase a license to continue using the service. The F64 SKU is a paid SKU, so once you start using your cores you pay by cores, and if you opt out it would delete your environment so you would lose your stuff.

Fabric (preview) trial - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

[germo]

And if after finishing the test, I (or my customers) don't want to use a F64 capacity, but a smaller one?

• Would it be possible to scale down or scale up existing Fabric capacities?
• Would it be possible to migrate the content into another Fabric capacity?
• Are there any ways to save my work to use it later in another capacity?

Because fabric would be great also for small companies, which are not able to pay the current Power BI Premium.

It makes not so much sense to even start a bigger or serious test, if we will lose all our stuff. Microsoft marketing was about: "we know about issues with vendor lock-in, and fabric will also solve this issue". I am even fine with vendor lock-in, I don't want to use my fabric staff outside Microsoft fabric. All my BI is based on Microsoft, since Microsoft has BI products. But I would like to see ways, how to save my stuff to use it later in other (paid!) fabric capacities, also at other customers. This should also be fine for Microsoft: We developers will promote fabric, but we should be able to save, what we evaluated and created. Because we also spent our time and energy to be able to promote fabric after our tests. We are influencers, opinion makers, we promote our solutions to decision makers, and this should be a win-win.

BTW, a limited but free developer fabric capacity would also be a great idea. Something like SQL Server developer editions, which can be used to develop, but should not be used in production. 

[germo]

And how I could save my developments (notebooks, ...), when the trial ends? There is no connection to source control (only power BI reports can be connected to an Azure git repository). In "normal" environments outside Fabric I can always put everything under source control, I can use any git location, and I can use my code in other locations.

Is Fabric a closed system: "come in, stay here and pay"?

I was so impressed after seeing the first videos about Fabric. But how to use it as a BI developer?
Open source formats for data (databricks, deltalake) in the background, the idea is great. But how I get my work saved and could use it later in another capacity?

[GeethaT-MSFT]

@germo The question of "is it a closed system" I would say - "No" but is it a system that requires licensing "Yes" - there will need to be some type of payment method associated with hosting your content, the smallest SKU could meet your needs with respect to having development only material and then simply switching the capacity utilized to a higher SKU whenever you're ready for a production scenario. And more items will support built in Git integration and source control with time - you could open and save your notebooks locally if that's a big concern at the moment.