Skip to main content
Microsoft Idea

Power BI

Needs Votes

provide power bi embedded consumption based pricing

Vote (36) Share
Richard Mintz's profile image

Richard Mintz on 26 Jun 2017 23:56:16

One of the cloud value props is the ability to scale up or down based on consumption/utilization. the new pricing model for Power BI embedded removes this. Pre Purchasing compute should provide a cost savings to the consumer as the providers revenue certainty increases. The new pricing model provides revenue certainty for MS without savings for the consumer.

Comments (6)
Richard Mintz's profile image Profile Picture

Myreports.online on 05 Jul 2020 23:55:12

RE: provide power bi embedded consumption based pricing

Absolutely. As Nick mentioned, lesser expensive options should be available. Current pricing is not suitable for startups due to high entry costs in MVP initiation itself.

Richard Mintz's profile image Profile Picture

Ben Hatton UNSW on 05 Jul 2020 23:53:19

RE: provide power bi embedded consumption based pricing

A thousand times yes - current approach of reserved capacity for embedded presents a hurdle for adoption that no-one in the organisation can overcome. PowerBI is abandoned and unused in scenarios that would otherwise be perfect for it.

Richard Mintz's profile image Profile Picture

ThomasDay on 05 Jul 2020 23:30:47

RE: provide power bi embedded consumption based pricing

Let me embrace what Lars has pointed to with our real world experience. Our models are very query heavy--that is our value proposition---allowing users to select and tailor comparison groups of health care providers to make strategic comparisons with of some 1000 operating, quality, safety, pricing, and market share metrics. Our site capacity is largely underutilized with occasional spikes when users actively query our models. The spikes cause the site to freeze--with a dreaded "white screen" for 5-10 minutes at the A3 price tier and with 1-2 users. Price tiers are not scale-able up and down--rather one tier shuts off while the new tier is configured and turned on...a process which takes 3 minutes! The dev team must have their eye on a use case that is very narrow--many many users accessing simple financial reports comes to mind though just a guess. Whatever the design use case--it is hardly universal and the pricing model is very punitive to us for sure and I suspect many others as well. It will restrict Power BI being adopted broadly as a viable embedding platform, in my opinion.

Richard Mintz's profile image Profile Picture

Nick Gallant on 05 Jul 2020 23:26:18

RE: provide power bi embedded consumption based pricing

Please introduce an A0 tier for Power BI Embedded.

Richard Mintz's profile image Profile Picture

Ross Witeszczak on 05 Jul 2020 23:02:32

RE: provide power bi embedded consumption based pricing

I can't echo this enough, the minimum price I can see is nearly £600 a month for a 2x0.5cpu with 3gb of ram? That is insane for entry level. I'm a startup building an MVP with some visualisations on the end - instead I'm having to use d3/django which is annoying since the data is already in azure sql db's

Richard Mintz's profile image Profile Picture

Lars Kemmann on 05 Jul 2020 22:52:26

RE: provide power bi embedded consumption based pricing

The current PBI Embedded Premium tier is built around the idea of constant render capacity per minute. No ISV, and for that matter no enterprise, that is considering a capacity of X renders/min will ever, *ever* use all X renders every minute of every day. We need the consumption model, because while the reserved model may be helpful for those whose consumption *regularly exceeds* a certain level and need more consistent performance (big enterprises w/ steady-state demand), for the rest of us the whole reason for moving to the cloud is that we expect to scale in real-time with demand. Paying for so much reserved capacity is a huge waste of resources for an ISV or startup, and it's the waste, not the TCO, that kills the value proposition for PBI Embedded.

PBI Team, you just need to reverse the math for the current 5 renders/minute tier: if you were to re-enable a consumption model at $0.0029/render ($650 = 5 renders/min 24x7), or mark it up 72% and make it $0.005/render, you would have what you need to win in the ISV & startup space: a self-service BI solution with the ability to scale from the ground up, from a level where programs like BizSpark are still essential to the point where an ISV finally sees enough usage of their service that paying for the reserved capacity makes sense. That's the gap that is not being addressed by PBI Premium.