Power BI/Fabric Free Accounts

[cwollett]

TL;DR: Do free accounts still exist? And if so, what steps do we have to go through to re-enable them?

I work at a university where all of our accounts are Microsoft accounts. Our staff are granted Power BI Pro licenses as part of our overall licensing contract, so we have never seen the need o upgrade to Power BI Embedded or Premium acccounts. Our students do not get Pro accounts by default. Before Fabric, we had students use Power BI Free accounts with the desktop application. I believe this also let them make things within their own personal workspace on the Power BI Service.

Now that Fabric is live, we have been getting reports that students can no longer create Power BI Free accounts. When I tested this myself, I get a screen that says:

Your organization doesn't currently allow its users to purchase Microsoft Fabric free. Contact your IT admin for more information.

I have checked within the Power BI tenant settings and see nothing there about free accounts. I have also checked with our M365 admins to see if something is turned off on their end, and they say the only thing they can find has to do with turning off the ability to start a Fabric trial.

The Power BI pricing page insinuates there is still a free tier out there.

1. Is the free tier still available?
2. If not - are there limitations to using Power BI Desktop without an account?
3. If the free tier is still available, what settings need to be configured to allow users to self-assign the free account to themselves (without the Fabric trial)?

[Anonymous]

Hi, @cwollett 

May I ask if you have gotten this issue resolved? If it is solved, please share your solution and accept it as solution, it will be helpful for other members of the community who have similar problems as yours to solve it faster.

If it is not resolved, please provide us with more detailed information (excluding private information) and we will do our best to help you solve the problem you are experiencing.

I hope my suggestions give you good ideas, if you have any more questions, please clarify in a follow-up reply.
Best Regards,
Fen Ling,
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Greg_Deckler]

@cwollett So, here is what I think I know. Seems that they have essentially deprecated or are in the process of deprecating Power BI (Free) licenses. That license doesn't appear in one of my tenants any longer (Office tenants) when it used to show up and in my newer office tenant it doesn't show up at all or even show up as something that I can purchase. Now, these license types used to automatically show up in your tenant with like 10,000 available licenses. Microsoft Fabric (Free) shows up in one of my tenants like this. For my other tenant I had to go "purchase" the Microsoft Fabric (Free) license (for free) in order to get it to show up in my tenant as something that I could assign. So, Microsoft Fabric (Free) still exists but perhaps you need to go "purchase" the licenses or otherwise it can't automatically assign one? Not sure and it definitely seems to vary between tenants.