Set up Email Subscriptions for External Users

This one's been open for years and it still bites partner/ISV scenarios. Root cause: native subscriptions are built for licensed users inside your tenant, so "subscribe on their behalf" is blocked the moment the recipient is outside your domain — and external users can only self-subscribe if they log in with a license, which defeats the purpose for clients who'll never sign in.

For partner/ISV delivery specifically, the pattern that works is Power BI Embedded (reports served through your app on your capacity, no per-user license) plus a scheduling layer that emails the exports on a cadence, scoped by RLS role. That sidesteps the subscription engine entirely.

Full disclosure — I work on a tool that does exactly this (Embedsy), so I'm not neutral. But even if you build it yourself, that's the architecture that works. I wrote up the why and the how here: https://embedsy.io/blogs/schedule-email-power-bi-reports-external-users