Seeking Cost-Effective Power BI Fabric Integration for a Small Team

[BiWithMarius]

Hello, Power BI Community,

I'm reaching out for guidance on integrating Power BI Fabric into our small company's data architecture in the most cost-effective way possible. Here's a brief overview of our situation:

• Company Size: We are a small team of 40 employees operating with a limited budget.
• Current Setup: Our data reporting is currently powered by Power BI Cloud, with dashboards built from complex data pipelines connecting to third-party services. We recognize that our setup would greatly benefit from utilizing Data Factory and Data Warehouses.
• Licenses: At present, we only have 5 Pro licenses, used exclusively by our leadership team to access reports.
• Objective: Inspired by the capabilities demonstrated during a 60-day trial, we're eager to leverage Power BI Fabric to elevate our data architecture. However, we are challenged by the pricing structures we've encountered. Despite extensive research through blogs and video tutorials, the pricing options remain unclear to us.

Given our small user base (only 5 users) and the disproportionate jump in costs (from €50/month for 5 Pro licenses to potentially €3000/month for necessary capacity), we're seeking advice on how to proceed.

Question: Could anyone advise on the most economical approach to gain access to Power BI Fabric functionalities for our small group? Our goal is to enhance our data projects without incurring exorbitant costs.

Thank you in advance for your insights and recommendations!

[TomMartens · Accepted solution]

Hey @BiWithMarius ,

if you want to leverage the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, you need to purchase a F capacity. The good thing about F capacities is the fact that they come with smaller sized compute units than P capacities. Here you will the pricing details: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/microsoft-fabric/
Make sure you select the proper region.

All F capacities smaller than F64 require Power BI Pro licenses when access access Power BI content (reports, dashboards, apps, data flows gen1, and datamarts). Power BI Free licenses can only be used with F64 and above.

You do not need to have a Pro license if you are creating a pipeline..

Hopefully, this helps to find you a suitable solution.

Regards,

Tom

[BiWithMarius]

Hi @TomMartens ,

thank you for the response. I will sum up again for someone else trying to estimate the price for a small company.

After reading your message and some further articles I assume the cheapest out of the box option for us would cost around 350€/mo. if we get an F2 capacity and some Pro accounts. F2 should be able to easily manage tables with arount 10 million rows. 

The price could be reduced to approximately 200€ a month if we turn on the capacity only for working hours. Unfortunately, automating the process of turning it on and off is not as easy as expected and can only be done with some API calls. 

Regards, 

Marius