Power BI Premium

Power BI Premium

Previously available were two tiers, Power BI Free and Power BI Pro ($10/user/month).  The problem with Power BI Pro is that for large organizations, this can add up.  In addition, their performance needs might not be met.  Power BI Premium, which is an add-on to Power BI Pro, addresses the concern about cost and scale.

For costs, it allows an unlimited number of users since it is priced by aggregate capacity (see Power BI Premium calculator).  Users who need to create content in Power BI will still require a $10/month Power BI Pro seat, but there is no per-seat charge for consumption.

For scale, it runs on dedicated hardware giving capacity exclusively allocated to an organization for increased performance (no noisy neighbors).  Organizations can choose to apply their dedicated capacity broadly, or allocate it to assigned workspaces based on the number of users, workload needs or other factors—and scale up or down as requirements change.

There will be changes to the Power BI’s free tier.  Users of the free tier will now be able to connect to all of the data sources that Pro users can connect to, including those available through the on-premises data gateway, and their storage quota will increase from 1GB to 10GB.

 The data refresh maximum increases from once daily to 8 per day (hourly-based schedule), and streaming data rates increase from ten thousand rows per hour to one million rows per hour.

For Power BI Premium, you get 100TB of storage, data refresh maximum of 48 per day (minute-based schedule), and soon-to-be-available is that the dataset size cached limit is removed (it is 1GB in Power BI Pro), so you will be able to build models as large as the Power BI Premium dedicated capacity memory can hold (currently 50GB).

Upcoming features for Power BI Premium include the ability to incrementally refresh the data so that only the newest data from the last day (or hour) is loaded into Power BI, pinning datasets to memory, dedicated data refresh nodes, read-only replicas, and geographic distribution (see Microsoft Power BI Premium Whitepaper for more info).

Users of free tier will no longer be able to share their reports and dashboards with other users.  Peer-to-peer dashboard sharing, group workspaces (now called app workspaces), export to PowerPoint, export to CSV/Excel, and analyze in Excel with Power BI apps are capabilities limited to Power BI Pro.  The rationale for this is that if the scope of a user’s needs are limited to personal use, then no fees should apply, but if the user wishes to share or collaborate with others, those are capabilities that need to be paid for.  For existing users of the free service who have been active within the past year, Microsoft is offering a free, 12-month extended trial of Power BI Pro

If you are sharing dashboards/reports with free users, beginning June 1st they will need to take advantage of the extended Pro trial to continue accessing the content. After the extended trial expires, users will need a Pro license to maintain access.