Forum Discussion
Another Power BI licencing question
- 1 year ago
I understand your frustration Power BI licensing and setup can indeed seem complex, especially when dealing with multiple tenants and evolving services like Microsoft Fabric. To answer your core question: if you're the only developer creating reports in Power BI Desktop and want to share them via Power BI Service, each user (including you and any colleagues viewing the report) needs a Power BI Pro license this is the minimum requirement for sharing content within the same tenant. You do not need Fabric capacity unless you're using Fabric-specific features like Data Warehousing or Real-Time Analytics; your Power BI content will work fine without it for now. The reason your trial keeps rolling might be because you're on a Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) or Fabric trial, which includes extended capabilities but once it ends, you’ll need to purchase either Pro or PPU licenses depending on your needs. Lastly, having two tenants (your company and the parent company) adds complexity because Power BI content is tenant-specific, and sharing across tenants requires external sharing setups or workspace access permissions, which must be carefully managed with IT. I recommend consolidating reporting into one tenant if possible to simplify access and governance.
To put it simply: if your company has 20 users who need to either build or view reports, you will need 20 licenses, each costing $14 per month.
To clarify, if you don’t require fabric items like Warehouse, Lakehouse, or Dataflow Gen2, you do not need a fabric license.
The only scenario where purchasing a fabric license (F64), which costs $5,000 per month with a reservation subscription, makes sense is if you have more than 357 users who need to view reports. This is because with an F64 license, end users can view reports without needing their own licenses—only the report builders need licenses.