Power BI pricing in 2026: Free, Pro, Premium Per User and Fabric — and what sharing a report really costs

Power BI costs nothing to build reports in and $14 per user per month to share them. As of September 30, 2026, Microsoft lists a free account, Power BI Pro at $14.00 per user per month paid yearly, Power BI Premium Per User at $24.00, and Power BI Embedded at a variable price; Power BI Desktop, the Windows app most reports are built in, is a free download. The price that decides the bill is sharing: a free account cannot share, and everyone who opens a shared report in a normal workspace needs a Pro licence too. The only way around per-viewer licences is capacity — Microsoft Fabric F64 or larger — which starts at $8,409.60 a month pay-as-you-go. Below: every plan, what it allows, the arithmetic for a marketing team, and when capacity starts to pay.

Power BI plans and prices (September 2026)

From Microsoft's Power BI pricing page and Azure's Fabric pricing page, read September 30, 2026. Microsoft notes that prices vary by currency, country and region; Fabric prices are those shown for the page's default region.

Pro and Premium Per User went to these prices on April 1, 2025, the first Power BI price change since launch, according to Microsoft's announcement. Pro is also included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5, so an organisation on those plans already owns it.

The rule that decides the bill: every viewer needs a licence

Microsoft's pricing page is short on it, but the footnotes carry the rule: a Pro licence is required to publish content, and letting people view and interact with reports without their own paid per-user licence is only available on capacity of P1 and above, or Fabric F64 and above. Below F64, a shared report is read by licensed users only — the free account cannot share or read shared content, per Microsoft's licence guide.

For a marketing team the arithmetic is simple and it scales with readers, not builders:

• 3 people building, 12 people reading: 15 Pro licences, $210 a month, $2,520 a year.
• An agency showing dashboards to 40 client contacts: 40 more Pro licences — $560 a month — unless the clients already have Pro in their own tenant.

Publish to web removes the licence question by removing security: Microsoft warns that anyone on the internet can view such a report, including detail-level data in the model that the report doesn't display.

When Fabric capacity is cheaper than Pro licences

F64 is the smallest capacity where viewers need no paid licence. At $8,409.60 a month pay-as-you-go, it costs the same as about 600 Pro licences ($8,409.60 ÷ $14 = 600.7). With a one- or three-year reservation, which Azure's page lists at $5,002.67 a month (about 41% less), the break-even drops to about 357 viewers. Builders still need Pro to publish on top of either.

So capacity is an organisation-wide decision, not a marketing one: a marketing department with 30 readers is nowhere near it, and smaller F SKUs (F2 at $262.80 a month) buy compute for other Fabric workloads without removing the per-viewer rule.

What a marketing team pays on top of the licence

The licence is rarely the largest line. Power BI connects natively to GA4, Google Sheets and CSV files, but not to Search Console, Google Ads or Meta Ads; those come through a partner connector billed monthly, Power Query work against each platform's API, or a warehouse in between — the Power BI marketing data sources guide prices each route. Pro's eight scheduled refreshes a day are enough for daily marketing data, but the partner connector's own sync schedule and API quotas usually set the real freshness.

If the goal is a shared marketing dashboard, not Power BI

TableBI is not a Power BI connector and does not replace Power BI for modelling. It covers one narrower job: Search Console, GA4 and Google Ads connected live and Meta Ads in beta, queried in read-only SQL by your own agent, and any answer pinned to a public, read-only URL that refreshes itself — which viewers open without an account or a licence, and which anyone holding the link can see. It is free for one source and one live dashboard. It has no white-label reports, no scheduled PDF or email delivery and no alerts.

# spend and ROAS by channel, then a link to share instead of licences
tablebi ask "SELECT platform_label(platform) AS channel, SUM(cost) AS spend,
             roas(SUM(conversion_value), SUM(cost)) AS roas
             FROM facts WHERE date > (SELECT MAX(date) FROM facts) - 28
             GROUP BY platform ORDER BY spend DESC"
tablebi pin --title "Paid channels, latest 28 days" --widget "ROAS by channel=SELECT …"

FAQ

Related guides

• Power BI alternatives for marketing teams
• Power BI for Mac: the four ways to run it
• Power BI data sources for marketing
• Tableau pricing in 2026
• Looker Studio vs Power BI
• Looker vs Looker Studio (Data Studio) pricing

Sources

• Microsoft — Power BI pricing
• Microsoft Azure — Microsoft Fabric pricing
• Microsoft Power BI Blog — Important update to Microsoft Power BI pricing
• Microsoft Learn — Power BI service features by license type
• Microsoft Learn — Publish to web from Power BI

npm i -g @tablebi/cli && tablebi install