What does Power BI cost your team, and who needs a licence?

Power BI costs nothing if you only build reports for yourself. To share them, every user needs Power BI Pro or Premium Per User. At Belgian list prices, Pro costs 12.10 euros and Premium Per User 20.80 euros per user per month, excluding VAT, on a yearly plan. What surprises most teams: someone who only views a shared report also needs a paid licence. That changes only on a Fabric capacity of F64 or larger, which costs thousands a month.

For a team of 15 who all look at the reports, Pro comes to 2,178 euros a year in licences. Building the reports, connecting your data and keeping it all up to date come on top. Below you find what each licence gives you, what it costs for 5, 15 and 40 people, and where the hidden costs sit.

Power BI licences at a glance

All prices are Belgian list prices excluding VAT on a yearly plan, read on 1 November 2026. Microsoft changes them regularly, and prices in pounds or dollars differ.

Power BI free: what you can and cannot do

Power BI Desktop is a free program for Windows. You connect your data, build charts and tables, and save the report on your own computer. With a free licence you can also put it in the Power BI service, but only in your own workspace.

Sharing is not possible. A colleague cannot open your report, you cannot publish to a shared workspace, and you cannot send a report subscription to someone else. For an analyst who looks at their own numbers, free is enough. For a team it is not.

Power BI Pro price: 12.10 euros per user

Pro is the licence most companies take. You publish reports in shared workspaces, share dashboards and collaborate with other Pro users. A model can be up to 1 GB, and you can schedule up to 8 refreshes a day.

The rule to remember: Pro shares with Pro. The accountant who checks the revenue report every month, the team lead who wants to see production, the owner on their phone: each of them needs a Pro licence. If your company is on Microsoft 365 E5, Pro is already included. Business Basic, Standard and Premium do not include it.

Power BI Premium Per User price: 20.80 euros

Premium Per User, PPU for short, gives you everything in Pro plus features that used to come only with an expensive capacity: models up to 100 GB, 48 refreshes a day, incremental refresh, deployment pipelines and the XMLA endpoint for anyone working on the model with other tools.

The trap: anyone who opens a report in a PPU workspace needs a PPU licence too. Pro is not enough. Put a report for twenty viewers in a PPU workspace because the model is large, and you pay twenty times 20.80 euros.

Power BI cost per user, per month and per year

These are licences only. They count everyone who opens a shared report, including people who look once a month. Over three years, a team of 15 pays 6,534 euros in licences on Pro and 11,232 euros on PPU.

A worked example: a company of 25 people

Take an installation company of 25 people. Two people in the office build the reports, the owner and four team leads look at revenue, hours and open work orders every week, and the other eighteen only want to see their own schedule.

Put everything in Power BI and all 25 need a Pro licence: 3,630 euros a year. Keep Power BI for the seven people who actually analyse, and show the schedule in your own software through an integration, and you pay 1,016.40 euros a year. The difference is not a cheaper licence, but deciding who really needs Power BI.

When a Fabric capacity pays off

On a Fabric capacity of F64 or larger, people with a free licence can view reports. You then pay for the capacity, not per viewer. At US list prices an F64 costs around 5,000 dollars a month on a one-year reservation, and more when you pay by the hour.

Against Pro at 12.10 euros per user, that only pays off from around four hundred viewers. For a small business that is almost never the case. Smaller capacities, below F64, do not let free users view: there every viewer still needs Pro.

The costs that are not on the price list

Someone who builds the reports. Power BI is a tool, not a ready-made dashboard. Someone has to connect your data, set up the model, write the DAX formulas and design the reports. Do it yourself and it costs hours. Have it done and you pay a consultant by the day.

Upkeep. A new field in your accounting, another branch, a different question from the owner: every report has to follow. Whoever built it becomes whoever maintains it.

Data in the office. If your data sits on a server in the office, you need a gateway so Power BI can refresh. The software is free, but it runs on a machine that has to stay on and that someone manages.

Training. Reading reports is easy. Changing them takes knowledge of the model and of DAX. Budget for training for whoever has to do that.

Viewers outside your company. A customer or a driver without a Microsoft account cannot simply look along. That takes a guest account with a licence, or Power BI Embedded, which has its own pricing model.

Power BI or a dashboard of your own

Power BI is strong when an analyst wants to ask questions of a lot of data, with filters, drill-downs and their own calculations. There it is hard to beat, and the licence is worth it.

Many teams want something else. They want to see the same five numbers every morning: how many jobs today, which invoices are open, which KPIs are turning red. With Power BI you pay a licence for every viewer, while a custom dashboard shows those numbers to everyone, on the phone too, without a licence per person.

For a Belgian transport company we built a platform with a dashboard, a fleet report and a report for customs that shows discrepancies. It sits in the platform itself, not in a separate reporting package, and the people who open it need no Power BI licence. The full story is in the DA Logistics case.

The trade-off between renting and building is in build vs buy software. If you want to replace Power BI, the alternatives with prices are in Power BI alternatives. If your data lives in spreadsheets today, also read Excel vs Airtable.

How to lower your Power BI costs

Count who actually looks. After three months, check in the admin centre who opened a report in the last month. Licences for people who never look can go.

Choose Pro unless you really need PPU. A 1 GB model and 8 refreshes a day are enough for most small businesses. PPU makes every viewer more expensive.

Send a subscription instead of access. Someone who only wants a monthly overview can get it by email with an attachment. The recipient still needs a licence, but does not have to open the report, and you can bundle who gets what.

Show the fixed numbers somewhere else. The five numbers everyone wants every day belong in your own software: your intranet, your scheduling or a small dashboard. Power BI stays for the analyst who wants to dig deeper.

What a dashboard of your own costs

A custom dashboard costs a build price and hosting, no licence per viewer. How much depends on the number of sources, the numbers and who may see what. How custom work is priced is in the guide on custom software development cost. Work out your own case with the software development cost calculator. The link with your accounting or scheduling is an API integration. We build it as a web application.

Want to know what Power BI costs you against a dashboard of your own? Get in touch.