Analytics
Power BI licensing & costs, explained in plain English
Microsoft's licensing pages answer every question except the one you asked: what will this cost my business? Here's the plain-English version — including who doesn't need a paid licence at all.
The four ways to pay (or not)
Power BI Free / Desktop. The full authoring tool on your PC costs nothing. One person can build sophisticated reports and share them as files. What Free can't do is publish securely to colleagues via the cloud service — the moment you need "everyone sees the live dashboard", somebody needs paid licensing.
Power BI Pro — around £11 per user per month (2026). The standard licence. Both publishers and viewers need Pro to share reports through the service, which is the fact that surprises everyone: 20 people viewing dashboards is 20 licences, roughly £2,600 a year. Still excellent value against the reporting hours it replaces — but budget for viewers, not just builders.
Premium Per User (PPU) — around £19–20 per user per month. Pro plus the heavyweight features: bigger datasets, more frequent refreshes, paginated reports. Most SMEs don't need it; data-heavy teams sometimes do. Everyone consuming PPU content needs PPU, so mixed estates need thought.
Fabric capacity (F SKUs). Instead of per-user, you rent capacity for the organisation. The economics flip at scale: capacities that unlock free viewing for everyone make sense once viewer counts reach the hundreds, and smaller F SKUs suit heavy data workloads with few users. Capacity can be paused and resized, which rewards good engineering.
The honest SME arithmetic
| Scenario | Sensible licensing | Rough annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 analyst, reports shared as files | Free Desktop | £0 |
| 3 builders, 12 viewers | 15 × Pro | ≈ £2,000 |
| Heavy models, 25 users | PPU or small Fabric capacity | ≈ £5,000–£8,000 |
| Hundreds of viewers | Fabric capacity + Pro for builders | quote it properly |
Prices are Microsoft's, move periodically, and vary with agreements — check current figures before budgeting. The structure above is what stays true.
Where money is wasted
- Pro licences for people who look at one report a month — a scheduled PDF/email export often serves them at zero cost.
- PPU bought to brute-force a badly built model — engineering the model properly is cheaper than upgrading everyone's licence; this is half of our report-rescue work.
- Capacity bought "to be safe" — capacity should be a calculated decision, not an anxiety purchase.
Where we fit in
Power Analytix builds exactly this kind of solution — scoped in writing, priced fixed, delivered by senior engineers. If you'd rather have it done than read about it, book a free scoping call.
The decision in one line
Start with Pro for exactly the people who genuinely need live dashboards, engineer the models so you're not paying licence fees to compensate for bad design, and move to capacity only when the viewer arithmetic says so. If you'd like that arithmetic done for your actual headcount, it's a ten-minute conversation.