Forum Discussion
Power BI Embedded Pricing - Am i mistaken?
We are a very small ISV with 2 co-founders. We have a BizSpark subscription and are currently using Azure for our infrastructure. We use a SQL Azure database.
I have created several reports to share with my co-founder and we each have a Pro license ($20 per month in total). I want to give the users of our application the ability to view some of these reports using RLS.
I've followed the "App owns data" tutorials and can now see the reports with no issues (great!).
However...
My co-founder informed me about new pricing for this. Last time I looked, Power BI Embedded charged by the session which was ideal. We have 15 customers and they will probably check these reports no more than twice a week.
To my horror, I checked the Azure pricing for Power BI Embedded and it is now telling me that my minimum price will be $750 per month. WTF?
Am I confusing services here? We aren't interested in dedicated capacity, and I've already linked our website to an embedded report without creating a Power BI Embedded service in Azure.
I would really appreciate anyone here clarifying where we stand. As a startup generating about $150 per month in revenue it makes absolutely no sense at all to use Power BI if these prices are what we'll now have to pay.
18 Replies
This really angers me and makes me want to avoid ms all-together.
Unfortunately the decision by MSFT to massively increase the price saw us have to go in a different direction.
insoldevHelper I
You are not mistaken. There has been quite a bit of backlash from the community, check out the following link.
http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Discussions-Changes-to-the-free/bd-p/ModeratedDiscussion
The subtext is that the previous model wasn't viable financially, though that is simply speculation at this point.
PaulAllen2412, do you have any options, in the interim, to use open source solutions until Power BI becomes a viable option for your firm?
Wow, that's absolutely insane. How can Microsoft justify such a massive deviation in pricing? I'm just glad I didn't roll out Embedded based on the previous pricing model! This is a huge eye opener for me using cloud, especially Azure. One greedy move by Microsoft and your business could be bankrupted. Incredible.
What makes me really angry about this is it goes TOTALLY against Microsoft's main tagline surrounding the cloud of "only pay for what you use" In this case it's bull, because I would be paying $750 per month to allow a handful of users to view a report a couple of times a week.
Anonymous in answer to your question I think my only option is to go elsewhere for my reporting solution. It's a shame as Power BI is fantastic, and as a developer with SSRS for the past 10 years its great to see the direction they are heading. Unfortunately Microsoft appear to want to completely abandon everyone in this space except for the large faceless corporations who can pay this.
Poor form Microsoft, very poor.
Eric_ZhangMicrosoft Employee
Thanks for your feedback.
The Power BI workspace collections which is charged by sessions is being deprecated. It will continue working for a limited time, after which all users will be required to migrate to the new system to continue enjoying the full-suite of Power BI Embedded features. At this moment you can still use Power BI workspace collections.
As to the new Power BI Embedded, which is charged at least $750 monthly(A1 tier), you can pause the the capacity for cost saving. You won't be charged if the capacity is paused. The product team is working on the correlated APIs so that it will be possible to start/pause the capacity in a programmatically way. Then you'll be able to pause the capacity automatically in off-work hours.
We ended up using Power BI internally (there are only 2 of us) and unfortunately our customers ended up suffering. We've just gone with very basic export to Excel for now until we can find something reasonable to offer.
With regards the SKU for $750, that's over $1k AUD per month. To put that into context, our business currently has a revenue of around $4k AUD per month. Spending 1/4 of our revenue on a reporting solution is totally incomprehensible from a business perspective.
Same situation here. I championed powerbi within my company and feel stupid now. we found out that its $750 (x2 for production and UAT servers) a month just recently and cannot turn off instances due to 99% uptime client expectations. the dashboards will hardly be used by 6 client users only once a week or even farther apart. so much money for a mostly idle machine. very dissappointed.
