Power BI Embedded Report Costs

Question

I have a Power BI Pro License which I used to publish the report to Power BI service. I used a Service Principal in Azure and Power BI Pro licensed master user to embed that report in a web-site in DEV environment. The source of the report is one of our own production database.

I went through the following documents to understand the costs I have to incur when i move the web-site to production. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/move-to-production https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-premium-what-is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/embedded-faq

I am still unsure about the cost of having this embedded report in my production web-site. I think one cost will be that of a Power BI Premium License. Will I have to also purchase and pay for any reserved capacity or shared capacity.

I want to keep costs at the minimum as the same report content has to be shown for all users. Can you please help me understand the costs incurred in using this embedded report in my production web-site. Also, suggest the most cost-effective way to implement my use-case.

Thanks, Gagan

Answer 1

You need as a minimum a 'A SKU' Power BI Embedded Capacity. This is purchased via Azure, and can be paused, so you only pay when the capacity is running. The pricing starts at $1 per hour, or $735 per month (but that is the cost running 24 hours per day) https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/power-bi-embedded/

As mentioned you can pause A SKU's only to reduce the cost. for example during business hours. As you have seen in the documentation, you do not need a Pro license assigned to the users to consume reports.

You only need a Power BI Pro license when creating or deploying reports or when developing your website to host the reports. Not using a capacity, and continuing to use the Power BI Pro method in a productionable way breaks the terms of the license, but you'll also run out of embedded tokens ( like here ), as it is limited.

There is no longer a pay to click method of deploying Power BI Embedded, it was replaced by the capacity model about three/four years ago.

Answer 2

At a minimum you need a Power BI Pro license, for yourself, to create/manage/share reports.

Depending on the amount of users that will be consuming your reports you will need to decide whether buying capacity (unlimited users, because you are buying computing resources versus user licenses) or buying individual pro licenses for these users and assigning them workspace access is a more cost-effective and scalable approach.

Let me know if this is helpful.