Forum Discussion
Impactful Individualnew power bi licensing
Dear Friends,
Today I have got an e-mail from MS Power BI which says that “changes to Power BI free licensing”. Under this new licensing policy,
- Do we have to have Power BI pro version to share our dashboards? Will it restrict the publish to Power BI service?
- If you have Pro version for the person who creates the dashboard share that with normal users within the company should the viewers also have to have pro version or the free version?
- Under free version are they going to extent the no of data bases that they support?
- If you specify your wise access to dashboard these yours should also have Power BI Pro version or only the free version would serve the purpose?
Thanks
Hi dilumd
Here are my answers to your questions
- Going forward you will have to have Power BI Pro to share dashboards. If you use the Free Version you are still able to publish to the Power BI Service, but you will not be able to share it with anyone.
- Going forward if you want to share the recipients of your dashboards will have to have the Pro or Premium licensing enabled.
- Under free they are going to give it the same capabilites as the Pro version, with one BIG change that there will be no sharing.
- For any access to viewing other peoples dashboards you will require the Pro or Premium licenses.
You can find more details here for the licensing
So this means that if you have 5 people developing PBI Reports and Dashboards and 95+ who just Consume reports that refresh Daily and/or don't use any of the sexy things that apparently PBI Pro offers ( https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-power-bi-pro-content-what-is-it/ ), you would now be paying $50 US per month but after June 1 you would have to pay $1000+ per month :-) ... even if you never use today's Power BI Pro features.
Simple math and kinda sucks frankly ... Good luck selling that to management ;-)
**bleep**
34 Replies
- GilbertQ
Super User
Hi dilumd
Here are my answers to your questions
- Going forward you will have to have Power BI Pro to share dashboards. If you use the Free Version you are still able to publish to the Power BI Service, but you will not be able to share it with anyone.
- Going forward if you want to share the recipients of your dashboards will have to have the Pro or Premium licensing enabled.
- Under free they are going to give it the same capabilites as the Pro version, with one BIG change that there will be no sharing.
- For any access to viewing other peoples dashboards you will require the Pro or Premium licenses.
You can find more details here for the licensing
ed_mcdillAdvocate II
Regarding point 2.
I think that the anwser is basically as guavaq stated:
"A Power BI Pro license is required to receive content from other users, unless the user is associated with dedicated capacity in Power BI Premium." this is from the pricing page small print. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
So if the users are within the premium capacity, they don't need to have a pro licence to receive content, but I guess that is obvious.
dmoffatSo this means that if you have 5 people developing PBI Reports and Dashboards and 95+ who just Consume reports that refresh Daily and/or don't use any of the sexy things that apparently PBI Pro offers ( https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-power-bi-pro-content-what-is-it/ ), you would now be paying $50 US per month but after June 1 you would have to pay $1000+ per month :-) ... even if you never use today's Power BI Pro features.
Simple math and kinda sucks frankly ... Good luck selling that to management ;-)
**bleep**
- alexSPY
Helper II
Hi GilbertQ,
Forgive me, but I am still confused. I am a Pro user, and have created several reports and dashboards which I share throughout my organization of 50+ users. Do these users, who simply view my content, have to be Pro users as well? They are not making edits to the content, they are simply viewing the content that I have developed.
Thanks for the clarification!
- dmoffat
Yes you are right ... $10 per person or $500+ per month :-) Great eh?
I have decided that there is ONE solution, and although I have kept it to myself until now, I think it might be time to mention it....
More than one person can log into a single Power BI account at a time ... So why not get ONE Pro account for each selected Group of your Viewers (it might be everyone so you may only need one) and share it and its password to everyone that will consume your Dashboards and Reports...
YES this was not how this was intended BUT frankly I really think MS's theory is that EVERYONE will be so busy creating their own Reports and Dashboards that they won't be able to to their actual jobs ;-) ... so they will NEED their own login.... Not true
A developer with their own Pro sub can then Share their content to the Group Pro license or licenses so they can consume the reports and dashboards. The Group account can be assigned only View rights by the Source account user and they can be prevented from changing, printing passing on the assigned docs.
The one thing that will always come up with this is the fact that any of the Group account users can add their own stuff to the Account. Simple solution though ... have the Admin go in and delete anything added periodically (like daily) and declare adding stuff to this account is a BCM (Bad Career Move)...
I know MS might try to declare this against the contract we have in a Pro license (but I don't see this anywhere) but nonetheless these Group accounts would be exclusively Viewing platforms and their demand on Power BI' processing and especially it's storage would be nothing at all.
We all know that logins and passwords are shared between co-workers EVERYWHERE for genuine reasons of keeping their business moving along, so this is not an outrageous idea. Also I do not think this is a security issue because any individual Licensee can always share their private Login and Password with anyone anytime, so what's the difference.
Also at any time an Administrator can change the login Password for a Group account and redistribute the new one to the list of acceptable Viewers. And of course if everything is created from PBIX files there will be backups of the Content always there if some a-hole changes the password themselves (which should be the last thing they ever do for your company ;-) )..
And since there are already many people who use their logins on different machines all the time and already share their logins I think if MS shut this down it would be politically unpleasant.
Then maybe MS would just come up with some cheap Viewer License (say $2 per Month?)...
Have fun with this ...
**bleep**
For me, this is a disaster... I was a huge fan of Power BI, and made sure that everyone in the company used the dashboards created by me. Now they should pay for just using these dashboards? No way I can explain this to my boss. The communication done by Microsoft was faulty on so many levels. They also promised that we would get a pro account for a year... doesn't happen since I've already tested the pro version. Such a rip-off. :smileymad:
- markduffill
Advocate I
I've been awating for some time the announcement of the ability to host Power BI reports on an on-premise server, like with SSRS.
Really disappointed to find that this is only available with the Power BI Premium offering at £3,100/month (UK pounds). Way too much for the SME customers I deal with.
I did manage to get a response from someone at Microsoft who said the Power BI Report Server will be available in the futre but had not pricing or dates. Does anyone have more infomration on this?
- dilumd
Yes! current licensing policy is way too expensive when compared to other possibile options. we are waiting for a possitive feedback from Microsoft. otherwise will have to evaluate onther software.
This is the worse news POWER BI Community has got since the release of POWER BI the best tool to make reports and share them has SHOOT himself with this decision. We had develop and build (& sell ) many dshboard with the feature to share it for free.
It seems that there is a new MKT manager with a different ponit of view on how this product should be develop beacuase this is not behaivor or the things we (users) had seen since the release and the develop of the product, that in my opinion it was the first MS product with a different mind set, focus on the customer use, instead of the money needed.
The solution will be to have a a micro-add ins to put in our customers web pages.
- dilumd
- markduffill
The YouTube video gives a clear explanation of the situation and also highlights the point that the Power BI Premium model is very unsuitables for SMEs - its just too expensive. Also, the Power BI Pro model makes it too expensive to give all users access to consume reports.
Here are my suggestions to Microsoft for a sensible model:
1) Release the Power BI Report Server seperately from Power BI Premium so that smaller organisations can have their own on-premise server (exactly like SQL Server + SSRS) with a licence for all users to consume reports. This should bring the cost down significantly as it removes the cloud service hardware, infrastructure and data streaming.
2) Make the chargeable Pro version the only version able to publish reports (to cloud service or on-premise server) and the free version able to consume from either. Ie Pro version is for authoring and publishing and free version for consuming. This just seems so logical to me.
An alternative to point 2) (as suggested in the YouTube video) is a Power BI Lite licence for the consume-only version. You can vote for this in Power BI Ideas:
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/19202278-power-bi-lite-license
Vote for separate on-premise Power BI Server here:
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/19210306-power-bi-server-for-smes
- dilumd
The structure doesn't make sense to me and Pro should be able to share which is for developers.
Viewing simples graphs should then be free.
My idea posted here:
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/19666702-free-license-for-sharing
