Forum Discussion
Fabric pricing for export to PDF API
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?
7 Replies
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
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.
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?
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.
