What is the real cost of moving PowerBI Embedded app to production?

[Caiss]

I'm estimating the costs of using PowerBI Embedded service for one of our customers. They want to incorporate PowerBI into existing web app, to enable their (regular, non-PowerBI) users to view, create and edit customized business reports.

As far as I understood the docs, in order to use PowerBI Embedded, we'd have eventually to go for PowerBI Premium (according to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embed-sample-for-customers#move-to-production).

The question is, what's the minimal possible price for PowerBI Premium? I tried out https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/calculator/ and the lowest amount I got was €4,200 per month. Needless to say, that's far too expensive for our customer. On the other side, I found this article (https://whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2017/09/understanding-the-power-bi-capacity-based-skus/), and there the prices seem affordable (eg. for A1-6 tier). .

I also found this discussion (https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Discussions-Changes-to-the-free/Power-BI-Embedded-vs-Premium-Clarif...). The entry prices mentioned there are around $650/month.

At this point I'm too confused to give our customer any conclusive value. Anyone could help, please?

[v-jiascu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Caiss,

Firstly, your scenario is App Owns Data. So a capacity is needed. 

Secondly, we can list the possible cost one by one.

1. At least one Power BI Pro account that will act as the master account. (Must have)

2. One Azure subscription and one Azure Active Directory tenant. (Must have and could be free which depends on your needs. active-directory-howto-tenant)

3. The Capacity. (Must have)

3.1 Generally, there are two types of capacity. Power BI Embedded capacity and the Power BI Premium. The former is hosted in Azure while the latter is in Power BI Service. Please refer to embedded-faq#what-is-the-difference-between-power-bi-premium-and-power-bi-embedded.

3.2 Regarding the price of Embedded capacity, please refer to pricing/details/power-bi-embedded/

Important: you can pause and restart the Power BI Embedded capacity as your business goes. Reference: power-bi-embedded/pause-start

Other references:

embed-sample-for-customers#prerequisites

Best Regards,

Dale

[Caiss]

Very helpful answer. Thank you.