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).

[dcg_brian]

I agree with edh. This is really no different than PDF files as far as I'm concerned. You pay to be able to create PDF files but the reader is freely available. The same should apply to Power BI. Same goes for exporting to Excel and PowerPoint. This is basic stuff and should be free.

[amrivera2]

would be nice

[daniel_bartley3]

So basically you want export to excel and PowerPoint to be included in a free or near free licence?

[c_a_bird]

There is a saying 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves (UK currency).' Given SME's are the future Enterprises it's worth the effort to attract and retain your SME customer base. After all Microsoft works with schools, colleges, universities to provide competitive pricing model with a view the user becomes a Microsoft client for life. Banks work hard to get university students to sign up for the very same reason. The chances are the student will remain a life time customer unless the bank does something really silly.

[k_terret]

I agree, it's problematic to have Pro Licenses only for people who need to read a report created with Power BI on Premises features. It doesn't sounds logical that the same kind of license is needed for users creating and sharing the reports & users only reading the Reports/Dashboards.. I'm sure many small/medium companies cannot move forward with Power BI because of this reason. For me, reading any kind of report should be available for free users, or maybe for "Lite Users" if there is more features available than the one for free users.

[b_delvaux]

I fully agree. We are a 500 seats company and would like to have 30 PBI Pro licenses + 1 capacity for the 470 remaining seats. It would cost us 4500€ which is the same if not more than what we would pay for 500 pro licenses... This is complete non-sense and because of that PBI rollout/adoption is totally frozen.

[jpoudou]

remember to negotiate the price. you can get a rebate of 20 or 30% if you negotiate for a minimum number of users (we got a special price because we guarantee 50 users) but I agree, we should have different pricing. maybe more based on the usage rather than the number of users. if we have users accessing dashboards 1 time a week, its different from a person accessing it every day. paying the same price for both of them is hard to justify.

[cwestling]

Completely agree! I have most likely wasted all the time I spent on this tool now that a Pro license is required for anyone to see the reports! Fine to require Pro to build reports, but we need a way to share them without a huge expense.

[landraak]

My company develop and sell UXRisk witch is a modern Multitenant Native Cloud solution on Azure. The clients are small go large companies. We have always recommended Power BI as the visualization tool, and we have a close integration with Power BI. Today most of our clients use the Power BI free in combination with Power BI Pro. After the new pricing model it is close to impossible for our clients to use Power BI. As a result it will also be very hard for us to sell UXRisk as a cost effective solution without replacing Power BI. I surly support the Power BI Lite License idea.

[joyjoy1]

Agree with all of the other comments. This is a very frustrating situation for us, and making for an incredibly poor user experience. What a poor reflection on all of Microsoft.