Power BI Pro and PPU prices after the 2025 increase, and how to stop paying per viewer

Licence	Until March 2025	Since April 2025	Increase
Power BI Pro	10 USD per user per month	14 USD	40%
Power BI Premium Per User (PPU)	20 USD per user per month	24 USD	20%

Microsoft announced the change in November 2024 on the Power BI blog. Monthly billing plans for annual subscriptions also became five percent dearer than paying the year upfront. The free Fabric licence, Fabric capacities and Power BI Embedded capacities were not repriced.

Pro is the licence almost every Power BI user holds: anyone who builds a report, publishes it or views it in a Pro workspace. The increase lands on three groups in particular.

• Organisations below the F64 threshold. Inside the Power BI service, viewers only get out of needing a licence when content sits on a capacity of F64 or larger, about 5,000 USD a month reserved. Everyone smaller pays per viewer, and every viewer now costs 40 percent more.
• Anyone sharing with people outside the company. Customers, partners and suppliers invited as guests each need a Pro licence too, or one you assign them. A hundred partners became 4,800 USD a year dearer overnight.
• Growing viewer counts. The per-user model was tolerable at 10 USD for a handful of people. At 14 USD, a report that spreads from a team to a department to a customer base turns licensing into the largest line of the analytics budget.

There is one way to show Power BI reports to people without a licence per viewer, at any capacity size: embedding them in an application that signs in on their behalf, the model Microsoft calls app-owns-data. The application holds the identity, the capacity renders the report, and the viewer needs no Power BI account. The F64 rule does not apply, because the viewer never enters the Power BI service. An F2 serves viewers licence-free just as an F64 would.

That is the model the Embedsy Portal is built on. Report authors still need Pro, because they publish to workspaces. Viewers do not, whether they are employees, customers or partners. The six ways to share Power BI externally are compared side by side if you want the full picture.

Take 50 people who need to see reports, two of whom build them, and a portal that is busy a few hours a day.

	Power BI Pro for everyone	Embedsy Portal
Viewer and author licences	50 Pro licences: 8,400 USD a year	2 Pro licences for the authors: 336 USD a year
Portal plan	none	50 users at 4 USD: 2,400 USD a year
Fabric capacity	not needed	an F2 running about 70 hours a month: about 300 USD a year
Azure resources	none	under 240 USD a year
Total per year	8,400 USD	about 3,300 USD

The portal side comes with branding, roles, row-level security and access for people outside your company, which Pro alone does not give you. The assumptions and two larger examples are on the cost examples page, and how capacities are billed is in Power BI Embedded pricing in 2026.

• A small internal audience, everyone already licensed: keep Pro. The increase is annoying, not decisive.
• A large internal audience inside the Power BI service: above roughly 350 Pro users an F64 capacity is cheaper than the licences, and it makes viewers free.
• External viewers, or a mixed audience that keeps growing: put the reports in a portal. The licence line stops growing with the viewer count, and you decide who sees what.

If the third case is yours, the Embedsy Portal has a 30-day free trial that installs into your own Azure tenant, and the people who built it will tell you honestly whether the numbers above hold for your setup.