What Microsoft charges you, before I charge you anything
Read this part before you hire anybody, me included. A good half of the BI quotes in this market are quietly pricing a licence decision you could make yourself in ten minutes.
| Licence | List price | What it actually means | Where the figure came from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power BI ProMicrosoft | $14user/mo, billed yearly | Included at no extra cost with Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5 — not E3. Raised from $10 on April 1, 2025. | Vendor page, read 2026-08-19 |
| Power BI Premium Per UserMicrosoft | $24user/mo, billed yearly | Does not provision a Fabric capacity. Raised from $20 on April 1, 2025. | Vendor page, read 2026-08-19 |
| Fabric F2 capacityMicrosoft | $263mo, pay-as-you-go | The Copilot floor since April 30, 2025 — it was F64 before that. About $156/mo on a one-year reservation. | Third-party table, 2026-07 |
| Fabric F64 capacityMicrosoft | $8,410mo, pay-as-you-go (about $4,982 reserved) | The tier where free-licence viewers can read reports. Reserved, it beats $24 PPU past about 208 viewers, or about 356 if $14 Pro is enough. | Third-party table, 2026-07 |
| Microsoft 365 CopilotMicrosoft | $30user/mo | First-year active use typically runs 30–55% of purchased seats. E3 goes $36→$39 and E5 $57→$60 from July 1, 2026, and E5 now bundles Security Copilot. | Vendor page, read 2026-08-19 |
Power BI Pro is $14 a user a month billed yearly, and it’s already included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5 — not E3. Check your licence page before you hire anybody. Premium Per User is $24.
Copilot needs a paid Fabric capacity, F2 or bigger. Pro and PPU don’t unlock it on their own, whatever anyone told you. F2 runs about $263 a month, and that matters more than it sounds: until April 30, 2025 the floor was F64, and most of the internet still writes about Fabric as though it still is. A 25-person company can be on Fabric with Copilot for roughly $613 a month, all in — F2 plus 25 Pro seats.
The one that decides it
F64 is also the tier where report viewers stop needing a seat at all, and the row above prints the crossover in both directions: against $24 PPU seats, and against $14 Pro seats. So if forty people read your reports, you should not buy capacity, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling capacity.
One honest note about those F-SKU figures. Microsoft only renders its own capacity prices to a signed-in session, so both came off third-party tables dated July 2026 and you should check the Azure calculator for your region before you budget. The $14 and the $24 are straight from Microsoft’s own page, read on August 19, 2026. I’d rather flag which numbers I borrowed than let you assume I checked them all.
You probably don’t need a warehouse
If you’ve got one operational database and no warehouse, the right answer in 2026 is usually still no warehouse.
Pro seats over a properly built star schema on the SQL you already run is a $6,500 engagement and $14 a head. A Snowflake or BigQuery stack with dbt on top runs $5,000 to $25,000 a month, forever. A Fabric lakehouse starts at $18,000 even on my own price list, which is under the market and still the wrong purchase for most of the people reading this. Almost everybody selling you analytics gets paid more if you pick the expensive one.
Fewer than two of the three below, and I’d rather you spent the difference on the model. That’s the part that decides whether any of the rest of it is right, and it’s also why the same question gets the same answer twice.
The three that change the answer
- Trigger 1More than one system of record disagrees on the same number and somebody has to arbitrate
- Trigger 2Reporting query load is measurably hurting the production database, with the slow-query log as the evidence
- Trigger 3You need history the source system overwrites — price changes, stock levels, address changes
Two of those true and I’ll build you the warehouse and say so. That third one is the honest reason most warehouses exist — a read replica cannot give you history the source overwrites, at any price. Postgres or Azure SQL is the sane default for this buyer, not Fabric.
When the answer isn’t Power BI
Four cases I run into often enough to print. In three of them you should close this page, and the licence cost is nothing.
Under about ten people
All internal, one Postgres or MySQL database behind everything. Metabase points at it this afternoon, and honestly a well-written SQL view on a scheduled email answers most of what you were going to ask a dashboard.
Licence cost · $0
Web and marketing traffic only
If the question is sessions, campaigns and where the traffic came from, Looker Studio is free, the connectors already exist, and it does that job well. Power BI is the wrong shape for it and you’d be paying for the shape.
Licence cost · $0
One number, one person
“How many orders yesterday, by product,” read by one person with their coffee. That’s a Drupal View, or a WooCommerce report, or a scheduled email. Twenty minutes of somebody’s time, once.
Licence cost · $0
And when it is right
You’re already on M365 E5, finance lives in Excel, more than ten people read reports, and the numbers live in more than one system. That’s the case Power BI was built for — and on E5 the seats are already paid for, which is the part nobody checks first.
Licence cost · $14/user/mo, often already bought
The $1,450 flat Reporting Readiness Check exists to settle which of those four you are, by reading your actual schema rather than asking you about it — and it will tell you if the answer is a SQL view and no new tool at all. The fee credits toward whatever you buy next, including nothing.
Every analytics price, one table
The modelling is the product. The chat box is the free part — Microsoft ships that, and what it’s pointed at is the whole job.
| Rung | Price | What lands on your desk | When | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reporting Readiness Check | $1,450 flat | A go/no-go on Power BI with the alternative named if it is not, and a fixed-price quote good for 60 days | 5 business days | Sellable today |
| Tableau → Power BI Assessment | $4,500 flat | A per-workbook fixed quote good for 60 days and a sequencing plan | 10 business days | Sellable today |
| AI License & Spend Audit | $950 flat | A cancel, downgrade or reassign list with the annual dollar figure and the renewal date it has to happen by | 5 business days from access | Sellable today |
| Three Questions | $6,500 flat | Three questions your business actually asks, answered off a star schema built on the database you already run, plus the eval set that proves the answers still hold next quarter. Each additional source, $2,500. | 10 business days | Published, not sold yet |
| Reporting Layer | From $15,000 · typically $15,000 – $28,000 | A modelled semantic layer over the systems you already run, the reports built on top of it, and documentation good enough that somebody else can maintain it | 4–6 weeks | Published, not sold yet |
| Warehouse | $25,000 – $45,000 | A dimensional model with orchestrated pipelines, history where the source overwrites it, lineage documented, and reconciliation tests asserting warehouse totals against source totals on every load | 6–10 weeks | Published, not sold yet |
| Fabric — data engineering into it | $18,000 – $35,000 | Source ingestion into a lakehouse from commerce and ERP sources, pipelines, semantic models over OneLake, and a capacity-sizing memo showing the F-SKU arithmetic before you commit | 6–10 weeks | Published, not sold yet |
| Signal | $650/mo | Refresh monitoring with an alert when a refresh fails or a row count moves outside a stated band, a quarterly semantic-model review, and one new or changed report page a month | Starts on the next cycle | Published, not sold yet |
| Signal+ | $1,450/mo | Everything in Signal, three report changes a month, the measure regression suite re-run on every source schema change, and a standing half-day quarterly review with whoever owns the number | Starts on the next cycle | Published, not sold yet |
About that last column
Three of these nine rows are sellable today. They’re consulting deliverables — somebody senior reads your systems and writes down what he found — and they need no portfolio to be honest. The other six are published with their real prices and not sold until the proof behind them lands: PL-300, and a semantic model with its eval set built on this studio’s own operational data, published with the licensing decision and the reasoning shown.
Publishing a price before you can fill the order is unusual. It’s also the only version of this page I’d be willing to sign my name to, because the alternative is a page that implies a shelf I haven’t stocked. If a date on that list slips, this page will say it slipped rather than quietly changing.
One honest floor, printed where you’d otherwise have to guess at it: a dashboard built on a model that already exists is a $1,200 to $2,250 job in an offshore market, and I would be a bad buy for it. What Three Questions actually is — one operational database modelled properly, the first three questions answered off it, and the eval set that proves the answers still hold next quarter — is where all of that five to tenfold difference lives. It’s connection, modelling and pipeline work, every dollar of it.
The monthly rungs are add-ons to any Air Time plan or standalone at the same price, with no six-month minimum, which there is nearly everywhere else. And there’s no analytics surcharge and no AI surcharge anywhere on this site: anything hourly is $250, the same as it is on every other page.
The questions people actually ask
What does a Power BI project cost here?
Every rung is on this page with its price and its turnaround. $6,500 flat for one operational database modelled properly with the first three questions answered off it, From $15,000 for a full reporting layer, $25,000 – $45,000 for a warehouse if you pass the entry test, and $650/mo or $1,450/mo a month to keep it honest afterward. There is no six-month minimum on the monthly rungs, which there is nearly everywhere else.
Do I need to buy Fabric capacity?
Probably not. Capacity only pays for itself once you have a lot of report readers — the F64 row in the licence table prints the crossover in both directions, against $24 Premium Per User and against $14 Pro. Under that, seats are cheaper, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling capacity. If what you actually want is Copilot, the floor is F2, not F64, and has been since April 30, 2025.
Why is half of this price list marked not sold yet?
Because it is. Six of the nine rows are published with their prices but not sold until the proof behind them lands: PL-300, and a semantic model plus eval set built on this studio's own operational data and published with the licensing decision shown. The prices go up before the proof does because publishing them is how you find out whether the practice is worth building. The diagnostics are sellable today and always were — they are consulting deliverables, not a portfolio claim.
Can you just build the dashboard? I already have the model.
Then I am a bad buy for you and I would rather say so here than on a call. A dashboard built on a model that already exists is a $1,200 to $2,250 job in an offshore market, and there is no version of that where my rate makes sense. Come back if the model is the part that is wrong, because that is the whole product on this page.
Do you do Tableau migrations?
$4,500 flat for the assessment: every workbook parsed and sorted simple, moderate or complex against a rubric you can read, with the unused and duplicated ones flagged for retirement rather than migration. What I will not publish yet is a per-workbook rate card, because I have not migrated a workbook. The day I have, that number goes on this page.
AI License & Spend Audit
$950 flat · 5 business days from access
You bought seats and nobody can say what they did. Book it sixty to ninety days before your renewal, because that’s the only window where the answer is actionable.
The scope →Reporting Readiness Check
$1,450 flat · 5 business days
Somebody wants dashboards and nobody has read the database yet. This is the read, with a go/no-go on Power BI and the alternative named if it isn’t.
The scope →Or just send a number
Free · same week
Moving off Tableau? Send me your workbook count and I’ll give you a band for the migration before you pay me anything. That part’s free and it’s staying free.
Send it over →Or write me three sentences about the number somebody upstairs keeps asking for and where it currently comes from. I’ll tell you which row above is yours, or that none of them are and you already own the tool that answers it.