Why do I have to pay for Power BI Premium features?
I generally see quite a lot of questions as to why certain features are only available in Power BI premium.
In this blog post below, I am hoping that I can explain as to why there is a cost associated to them.
Power BI Pro
Let me start by saying when I log in with Power BI Pro, I am using a shared infrastructure.
This means that for a lower cost I can share the infrastructure, which is like travelling on an airplane.
Travelling with a lot of people on an expensive airplane makes it relatively cheap to travel. Whilst if I had to do the same trip on my own airplane it would be very expensive.
That is why Power BI Pro is really cheap in my personal opinion for what you are getting!
Power BI Premium
Let me get into the guts of this blog post.
I hope that after reading below, it will become clearer as to why Power BI Premium comes at a cost.
Whilst I was at Redmon this year, I was very fortunate to be in a meeting with Matthew Roche, where I got the best explanation as to why there is a cost associated to Power BI Premium.
“Anything that requires to compute something comes at a cost”
For those who are unsure what compute is, it is defined as “to calculate an answer or amount by using a machine” as defined in the Cambridge Dictionary
What this means in the world of Power BI, anything that requires additional computing resources has a cost associated to run the compute and in order to make Power BI financially viable the cost is for the compute is put into the Power BI Premium licensing model.
What I would like to point out is that as Power BI Premium evolves, the price point currently stays at the same price, but you are getting a LOT more value for the price.
For example, when Power BI Premium started it just had dedicated capacity and automatic refreshes.
Then came along Incremental refreshes, after which came dataflows, geolocation and paginated reports.
There is a significant amount added to Power BI Premium with no extra cost!
As you can see below here are some of the premium features all require compute (Which means there is a cost to run this)
Conclusion
As you have seen above, I hope that have shown you what and why Power BI Premium has additional features and why there is a cost associated to them.
If there are any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.
It would be nice if over time the premium capacity can be paused and resumed… The cost is huge for just demo and development, and embedded doesn’t offer everything premium offers
Yeah that would be really good. You could vote for or create an idea at https://ideas.powerbi.com
That all makes sense except for incremental refresh. I would expect this would decrease compute power on the shared capacity as I would be refreshing a subset of data instead of my entire model each time.
It does decrease the compute power, but the compute power is still required to be able to complete the Incremental refresh
While the reasoning is sound, Pro users should have to option to use an on-premises server to run some essential features, paginated reports being the #1 in my opinion
That is always a good question.
My understanding is that because it is all managed in the cloud there is a cost associated to this.
I wonder if it would be possible to open up the Power BI Report Server to the Internet?