Calculate what Power BI costs you
The interactive calculator is loading. Quick estimate without it: number of users × €12.10 per month for Power BI Pro. With 15 users that is €181.50 per month.
What does Power BI cost in 2026? The prices at a glance
Microsoft charges per user per month, on an annual subscription. The last price increase was on 1 April 2025; prices have been stable since. These are the list prices in euros that you pay to Microsoft or your CSP partner.
| Licence | Price per month | For whom | Key limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power BI Desktop | €0 | Anyone building reports on Windows | Local only. Sharing is not possible without Pro. |
| Power BI Pro | €12.10 | Anyone who publishes, shares or views reports | Model up to 1 GB, 8 refreshes per day. Included in Microsoft 365 E5. |
| Premium Per User (PPU) | €20.80 | Teams with large models or heavy features | Model up to 100 GB, 48 refreshes per day, paginated reports, deployment pipelines. Viewers need PPU too. |
| Fabric capacity F2 to F32 | ≈ €150 to €2,400 | Businesses that also run data pipelines or a lakehouse in Fabric | Viewers still need Pro. Rarely worthwhile for dashboards alone. |
| Fabric capacity F64 | ≈ €4,700 (reserved) to €7,900 | Hundreds of viewers | Viewers no longer need a licence. Makers still need Pro. |
Fabric amounts are converted from the US list price and are indicative; check the current price with Microsoft or your licensing partner.
Which Power BI licence do you need?
For almost every SME the answer is: Power BI Pro for everyone who builds or views reports, and nothing else. With 15 users that comes to €181.50 per month. Premium Per User only becomes interesting when you hit the 1 GB limit, want to refresh more than 8 times a day, or need paginated reports. Note: as soon as a report sits in a PPU workspace, every viewer of that report needs PPU as well. The extra €8.70 per user therefore applies to the whole team, not just the builder.
Fabric capacity works differently. You rent compute per month, regardless of the number of users. The big advantage comes at F64 and above: viewers no longer need their own licence. That becomes cheaper than Pro at around 390 users, and cheaper than PPU at around 225 users. Smaller capacities (F2 to F32) do not give you that advantage: everyone who opens a report still needs Pro. They make sense if you also run data pipelines, notebooks or a lakehouse in Fabric, not as a way to save on licences.
One tip that often saves more than switching licence: optimise your data model first. Columns nobody uses, minute-level transaction data you only report per day, and measures stored as columns make a model unnecessarily large. In practice we regularly bring 3 GB models back under 1 GB, and then Pro is enough. For the full licence comparison, read Power BI licensing in 2026.
Worked examples: what does an SME pay?
- Wholesaler, 5 users. One builder, four viewers, Odoo and Moneybird as sources, 200 MB model. Pro for everyone: €60.50 per month, €726 per year.
- Service provider, 15 users. Two builders, thirteen viewers, HubSpot, Teamleader and Nmbrs, 600 MB model. Pro for everyone: €181.50 per month, €2,178 per year. With PPU this would be €312 per month.
- Retail chain, 50 users. Three builders, 47 viewers, Lightspeed with till lines per receipt, 4 GB model. PPU for everyone: €1,040 per month, €12,480 per year. Reducing the model to daily totals saves €435 per month.
Which costs come on top of the licence?
The licence is usually the smallest amount on the invoice. The real cost lies in the set-up: connecting your sources, building a data model with agreed definitions and creating the dashboards themselves. How large that amount is depends on the number of sources and the state of your data, not on the number of users. That is why it is not in the calculator: an estimate without knowing your sources is a guess, and a guess is no use to you.
On top of that, budget for a place where the data lives (a database or data platform, usually AWS for us, from a few tens of euros per month), and possibly maintenance: monitoring refreshes, small changes and user questions. What it costs for your sources and question we tell you in a 30-minute conversation, with a fixed price per phase. See how that works in our approach.