Power BI Lite License

[pbiideas1]

Power BI should have a Lite License for people that only consume dashboards or reports every now and then. This is for people that don't create reports but need to see the dashboards and may need to use the "report level" to be able to export output to PowerPoint (since you can't export the dashboard to PowerPoint but can only do it at Report level).

[markduffill]

Suggest: Power BI Pro - author and publish Power BI Free/Lite - consume

[mario_barria]

What we are looking for is a reasonably priced power Bi methos that lets small and medium businesses continue to work with this application; sharing reports, publishing or embedding. How can I get 10 different sales reps to look at our data once a week from their homes.

[Marie_Fagbemy]

Dear Power BI team, We have just spent weeks producing dashboards based on SharePoint list data to share with Senior management and make reports available to all staff and improve adoption in a project that took months to complete. People in our organisation were starting to show interest in Power BI and asking for a few licenses for their team etc. Because of this change, we are now looking at other products and will most likely experience a lot of slippage to figure out a workaround, not to mention the time wasted working on this for nothing. We cannot justify providing a PRO licence for every single member of our organisation even if they only need to look at a report or a dashboard once a month.

[matthieuhoule]

The Power BI licensing model is a joke.

[pbiideas1]

You shouldn't need a pro license to create a new personal dashboard (mashing up visuals from multiple reports). This is simply organizing information for personal consumption.

[mryckman1]

This is a critical thing for keeping Power BI useful for small and mid-sized businesses. I work for a non-profit that's invested a fair amount in Power BI, and we're now going to lose it because of Microsoft's licensing model. Tableau gave us their product for free and we still went with Power BI because we liked the features better. Now, it seems like that was a bad call. I would make a ~$2 "Viewer" license that can view (not create/edit) dashboards on any device, and increase the cost of a "Developer" license ("Pro" and "Premier" make no sense). I'd make a "Developer" license cost ~$30, and have them be able to create reports. I do agree that it doesn't make sense that a company should pay $10 and be able to have all the reports they need built by one person. But, in my contrived example, a 100 person company would pay $230/month - that's much more reasonable.

[angusfookes]

The pricing, along with a commitment for a year, will deter small developers. There's too much risk unless you already have quite a few established customers already who will commit. The peak load of 300 page renders per hour sets a limit on each price band. By doing it this way, you create the uncertainty and complexity that you were striving to avoid. The model is now complex and the costs are hard to work out. In terms of the pricing model, I can now see little benefit over the usage model of Power BI Embedded. All I see is a large increase in costs and further complexity.

[pbiideas1]

As a very enthusiatic user of Power BI I'm also very dissappointed about the release of Power BI Premium. The spike of price is just unacceptable. From $0 to $5000 a month. Even if they will introduce a slightly cheaper pricing model it's still killing my selling point to use PowerBI yet alone to switch from Tableau to Power BI for the whole organisation.

[michel2]

As I understood the new licensing model, the Pro subscription is needed to build and share reports, and the Free subscription can be used to view. If I make a price calculation on the Power BI site, it does only count the Pro subscriptions. However, we've built the reports/dashboards and used groups to separate stuff from eachother. Guess what: group functionality is not supported for Free users. This is a huge disappointment. I was super positive about Power BI, but looking at the new model and the experiences, I get the feeling now that the costs made to develop stuff now have to be re-earned. Retroactively. The pro subscription should only be needed for building and sharing. But users that occassionaly view a dashboard should not be presented with a license requirement, despite the used functionality to share them (groups or not). If more money has to be made, then make the Pro subscription 19.99 or something, I don't mind, but the current setup is terrible.

[heriberto_ceped]

I just run into this issue, I wanted to showcase the capabilities to some executives and when they wanted to access a sharepoint page where I embedded a report they were required to get a PowerBI Pro lincense... I guess the "as a service" vs license is not well figured out yet for powerbi