Forum Discussion
new power bi licensing
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**
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