Fabric pricing for export to PDF API

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I a rendering around 500 Pdfs from a report in Power BI using a Power Automate flow and an Azure billing in Pay-As-You-Go mode.

When the billing came out, there was two different meters: 

Available capacity usage and Power BI capacity Usage

Can someone please explain why the Power BI capacity is billed ? Is it not included within the Fabric capacity?

[KiranHosakote]

Hi @Anonymous 

Or you could give the Fabric pricing thing a miss and (if you are open to using third-party tools), see if BI Helper https://bihelper.tech meets your PDF report bursting requirement.

BI Helper is an easy to use SaaS application that automates the generation and emailing of user-specific PDFs (with filters and slicers applied). It is secure, scalable and works with a Power BI Pro / PPU license for the sender.

It doesn't require Power Automate or any IT infrastructure, and can be easily set up and run by a business user.

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous Oh boy, I've been waiting for Fabric billing posts to start appearing. I'm not sure if this is what you are running into but I have been reading some interesting articles on this of late:

Microsoft Fabric OneLake: A Tale of Two Pricing Models | Aimpoint Digital

Unweaving the Hidden Costs in Microsoft Fabric | Aimpoint Digital

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler 

Thanks for the articles!

So it means that if I overuse the CUs, the billing shifts to Power BI CU usage?

However, even for my daily task of rendering one report and sending it by email (around 10 minutes to let the data be refreshed),  there is a small fee of Power BI usage CU. I think this feature just generates other fees besides the Fabric capacity.

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous I think everyone is still trying to wrap their heads around Fabric pricing because it seems stupidly complex at the moment. Premium was amazingly simple, which was pretty much unique for Microsoft. So, it makes some degree of sense that they would decide to have the licensing now fall in line with the complex misery of all of their other products. 

Honestly, if you can figure it out fully, please let the world know by posting a blog article on the subject. One question I do have is what size F SKU are you running?

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler No problem!
May I figure it out!

It is an F32 SKU.

[Pascal_KTeam]

An F32 has 1920 CUs per minute. The usage report is in 30-second intervals. In 30 seconds, an F32 gives you 960 CUs to spend. From my testing, the creation of a PDF uses 1200 CUs. So, if you create many PDFs in a short interval, you will well exceed the F32 and most likely pay extra. Maybe try to add a waiting time between each PDF creation. 

[KiranHosakote]

Or you could give the Fabric pricing thing a miss and (if you are open to using third-party tools), see if BI Helper https://bihelper.tech meets your PDF report bursting requirement.

BI Helper is an easy to use SaaS application that automates the generation and emailing of user-specific PDFs (with filters and slicers applied). It is secure, scalable and works with a Power BI Pro / PPU license for the sender.

It doesn't require Power Automate or any IT infrastructure, and can be easily set up and run by a business user.