Cost management and licensing in Power BI are critical components of an organization's overall business intelligence strategy.

Power BI Licensing Types

• Power BI Desktop -> This is a free tool for creating reports and data visualizations on the desktop.




• Power BI Pro -> This subscription offers the ability to share reports, collaborate with teammates, and publish content to Power BI Service. Each user requires a Pro license to publish or consume content.




• Power BI Premium -> Premium provides dedicated capacity to deliver more consistent performance and support larger data volumes in Power BI Service. Licensing can be per user (Premium Per User or PPU) or per capacity, which is suitable for large deployments.

Questions to answer to determine which license is best for your business

• What is your budget?

• How many users need to publish content to Power BI Service vs how many users will only view content ?

• Do you need flexibility to use all publishing options for internal and external users?

• How much data do you intend to store within the Power BI Service?

• How often do you need to refresh the data?

• Do you need advanced functionality such as dataflows and data marts?

Cost Management Strategies

• Assess Needs -> Evaluate the organization's needs to determine the appropriate mix of Pro and Premium licenses. For example, not all users may need to publish reports; some may only need to consume them.




• Monitor Usage -> Use the Power BI admin portal to monitor usage and licenses. This helps in identifying unused licenses that can be reassigned or canceled.




• Optimize Refresh Rates -> To manage the load on resources, optimize data refresh rates according to business needs, rather than refreshing more frequently than necessary.




• Data Modeling -> Efficient data modeling can reduce the amount of data processed and stored, impacting the performance and cost.




• Manage Premium Capacities -> If using Premium, manage capacities by monitoring performance and adjusting as necessary to ensure optimal use of resources.




• Use Autoscaling -> For Premium capacities, consider using autoscaling features to handle occasional spikes in demand without permanently increasing capacity.




• Audit Reports -> Regularly audit reports to retire or archive those that are not used, reducing the service's storage and processing demands.