Forum Discussion
Help with Microsoft Fabric Capacity Sizing for Production Power BI Environment (F4 vs F8 vs F16)
Your bottleneck here is refresh, not model size, so size for that: 350 MB of models is nothing, but 11 models refreshing simultaneously off tens of millions of Snowflake rows every 2 hours is what will drive CU usage, so I'd start at F8 rather than F4 (F4 is tight for that concurrent refresh burst) and stagger the refreshes if you can. Scaling is instant and online, so start at F8, watch the Fabric Capacity Metrics app for overload during the refresh windows, and bump to F16 only if the data says so. One thing that's easy to miss: below F64, all 100+ report users each need a Pro license, so check whether viewer licensing rather than compute is actually the deciding cost before you settle on a SKU.
Looking at the numbers, I'd probably start with F8.
The model sizes themselves don't look huge, but the combination of 2-hour refreshes, multiple models refreshing at the same time, and expected growth over the next few years is what would make me cautious about going with F4.
I'd also try to stagger the refresh schedules a bit instead of having everything refresh together. That can make a noticeable difference.
F16 feels a little oversized based on the current workload unless you're expecting significant growth or planning to run other Fabric workloads on the same capacity.
If this were my environment, I'd start with F8, keep an eye on the capacity metrics for a few weeks, and then decide whether there's a real need to scale up.