Power BI licensing: which license do you need and what does it cost?

The three per-user licenses

Power BI has three licenses that belong to a person. Which one you need depends on where a report lives and what someone does with it.

• Free (Fabric Free). You build reports for yourself in your own workspace. Sharing and collaboration are not possible. You can view reports shared with you from a workspace on Premium capacity or Fabric F64 and larger.
• Power BI Pro. You publish to shared workspaces, share reports and dashboards and view what other Pro users publish. Pro is also included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5.
• Premium Per User (PPU). Everything in Pro plus most Premium features, such as larger models and up to 48 refreshes a day instead of 8. Sharing only works with other PPU users, unless the report sits on Premium capacity.

What a license costs

On Microsoft's US pricing page, Power BI Pro costs $14 per user per month and Premium Per User $24 per user per month, both billed annually. The Dutch pricing page lists €12.10 and €20.80 excl. VAT (checked on 24 September 2026). Fabric capacity is billed per capacity rather than per person; the price depends on size and region.

Add the work around the report to the license: data connections, model maintenance and user management. Those items are often larger than the licenses themselves. The article on Power BI costs and total ownership works this out step by step.

Who needs which license?

For a small or midsize company without Fabric capacity the rule of thumb is simple: everyone who creates or views a shared report needs Pro. That includes the managing director who opens the management report once a month and the project manager who only looks at their own projects.

• Report creators: Pro, or PPU if you need Premium features and your viewers also have PPU.
• Internal viewers: Pro, unless the report runs on F64 capacity or larger.
• External viewers, such as clients or shareholders: they also need a license to open a secured report, unless you share through capacity or Power BI Embedded.

When Fabric capacity pays off

From Fabric F64 or Power BI Premium capacity, viewers with a free license can view reports. Creators still need Pro or PPU. Capacity only pays off for a large group of viewers, because you pay for a fixed amount of compute even when it sits idle. Fabric capacities smaller than F64 do not give viewers that right.

So compare the number of Pro licenses you need with the current capacity price for your region. For most companies with a few dozen viewers, Pro remains the cheapest route.

Worked example for a small business

A construction company has 2 people who build reports and 13 colleagues who view them: leadership, project managers and the controller. That is 15 Pro licenses: 15 × €12.10 × 12 = €2,178 per year excl. VAT. If the number of viewers grows to 40, it becomes 42 × €12.10 × 12 = €6,098.40 per year.

The license bill grows with every new viewer, and the cost of data connections and maintenance comes on top. Treat this as a worked example: your own contract and discounts may differ.

Sharing dashboards without a license per viewer

Power BI has one way to show reports without a license: Publish to web. Microsoft warns that anyone on the internet can view such a report without signing in, including detail-level data in the model. For financial or customer data that is not an option.

If you want to share dashboards widely without a per-viewer license, a different model makes more sense. DigiData charges a fixed platform price plus an amount per connector; the number of viewers does not count. Colleagues view while signed in, and a public read-only link works for an office TV, for example. The AI agent builds DigiData dashboards on your connected sources; open the live dashboard examples to see what that looks like. A detailed comparison is on the Power BI alternative for small businesses page.

If you stay with Power BI, you can also use DigiData as a data source: the OData feed for Power BI delivers synchronized tables from your business software.

Common mistakes

• Licensing only the creators. Without capacity, viewers need Pro too; otherwise they see a message instead of the report.
• Mixing PPU with Pro. Content in a PPU workspace is only visible to other PPU users.
• Buying small capacity for free viewers. Free users can only view from F64 upwards.
• Using Publish to web for internal figures. The report and its underlying data become public.
• Comparing licenses only. Connectors, model maintenance and support often make up most of the total cost.