Power BI Embedded is a new service available to developers or independent software vendors to allow them to embed Power BI dashboards into their applications. Unlike the traditional Power BI per user subscription licensing, Power BI Embedded is based on consumption of reports by any user accessing the application.
Microsoft has changed the pricing model as the service becomes generally available. In the original pricing model, the price was per render of a dashboard or report. 1,000 “renders” was priced in preview at US $2.50. In the new pricing model, pricing is now per “session”, e.g. each unique user connecting to a unique report. Each of these sessions is now US $0.05 for a maximum 60 minute session. If your application has 10 reports and a user accesses all 10 reports, that’s $0.50 charged.
The advantage of this new pricing model is easier methods for calculating the consumption costs – it was difficult to figure out how many renders of a dashboard were needed for an application and on average how many might be consumed by an end user. With this model, it becomes easier to predict based on the number of users sessions you have in your application.
In addition, Microsoft has made development of reports free with an Azure subscription. Developers can access their own reports for dev/test at no cost – only end user consumption is charged.
