If you run Power BI at any scale in Australia, the licensing ground has shifted under you. The Power BI Premium per-capacity tiers — the familiar P1, P2 and P3 — are being retired, and the capability has moved onto Microsoft Fabric capacities (the F-SKUs). Microsoft stopped selling P-SKUs to new customers from 1 July 2024, and existing customers transition to Fabric at renewal. For most teams this isn't optional and it isn't far off.
The good news: the migration is mostly a workspace reassignment, not a data migration. The reports keep working. The harder part is the money. Fabric is priced and sized differently to Premium, and the old mental model — 'buy a P1 and stop thinking about per-user licences' — needs recalibrating. This piece lays out the numbers as we'd actually frame them for an Australian finance team.
What's actually changing
Power BI Premium gave you a fixed-size dedicated capacity (P1, P2, P3) and, crucially, let an unlimited number of people view published content with only a free licence. Fabric keeps that model but renames and re-sizes the capacities, and it unifies Power BI with the broader data platform (Data Factory, warehouse, lakehouse, real-time analytics) on the same capacity units.
The SKU mapping is clean: F64 is the like-for-like replacement for P1, F128 maps to P2, and F256 maps to P3. If you're on a P1 today, F64 is your default landing spot and your reports should run as before. The capacity is measured in Capacity Units (CU), and the F-number is the CU count — F2 is 2 CUs, F64 is 64 CUs, and so on.
Fabric F-SKU pricing, smallest to P1-equivalent
Here's the indicative AUD list pricing for pay-as-you-go capacities running 24/7. Every figure below is indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase, because the real number moves with region, currency conversion, your Enterprise Agreement and whether you reserve capacity. We've rounded deliberately; treat these as planning anchors, not quotes.
- F2 (2 CU): ~$380–$400/month — starter and dev capacity
- F4: ~$760–$800/month
- F8: ~$1,500/month
- F16: ~$3,000/month
- F32: ~$6,300/month
- F64 (P1-equivalent): ~$12,800/month pay-as-you-go — this is where free viewers kick in
Two things to flag. First, F2 is small. At roughly $383 AUD/month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase) it looks tempting, but it's a single starter capacity — fine for a dev workspace or a tiny departmental model, not a way to give a few hundred people free viewing. The free-viewer benefit only starts at F64. Second, pay-as-you-go is the expensive way to buy F64. A one-year reserved commitment typically takes 30-40% off, which materially changes the break-even maths below.
The per-user alternative, and where it stops making sense
For smaller deployments you don't need a capacity at all. Power BI Pro is roughly $16.90 AUD/user/month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase) and covers both authoring and viewing. Premium Per User (PPU) sits higher and adds the premium feature set per seat. For a team of 20-50 people, per-user licensing is almost always cheaper than any capacity, and it's simpler to administer.
The crossover is the whole game. Picture an organisation where most people only ever view dashboards. Each of those viewers costs ~$16.90/month on Pro. Move them onto an F64 capacity and they need only a free licence — but you're now paying for F64. The question is purely arithmetic: at what headcount does the stack of Pro licences you'd avoid exceed the cost of the F64 capacity?
The ~500-user break-even, worked through
Take F64 at pay-as-you-go, ~$12,800/month. Divide by ~$16.90 and you'd need roughly 750 viewers before F64 looks cheaper on viewing alone. But almost nobody buys F64 at PAYG. Apply a typical one-year reservation discount and the effective monthly cost drops toward $8,000–$9,000, which pulls the break-even down to roughly 480–530 viewers. Pause the capacity outside business hours and it falls further again.
One nuance that trips people up: authors don't go free at F64. If 40 of your 600 people build reports, those 40 still need Pro licences on top of the capacity. So the honest comparison isn't 'F64 vs 600 Pro licences' — it's 'F64 plus 40 author Pro licences' versus '600 Pro licences'. That still favours F64 at this scale, but it shifts the break-even and it's the kind of detail that turns a clean business case into an accurate one.
What we'd actually do
For a team under a couple of hundred viewers, we'd stay on per-user Pro and not buy a capacity at all — the admin overhead and the idle-capacity cost aren't worth it. If you're already on P1, F64 is your renewal destination and the work is reassigning workspaces, not rebuilding anything; budget for a reserved commitment rather than pay-as-you-go from day one.
- 1Count your true viewer-only population separately from your authors — the break-even depends on the split.
- 2Decide pay-as-you-go vs one-year reserved before you model costs; the discount moves the crossover by ~200 users.
- 3If you'll genuinely use Fabric's data engineering or warehouse workloads, weigh that into the capacity decision — you may be paying for F64 anyway, which makes free viewing a bonus rather than the justification.
- 4Plan capacity pausing for non-production or business-hours-only workloads to claw back PAYG cost.
- 5Confirm every dollar figure against the Azure pricing calculator in AUD for your region at purchase — the numbers here are indicative.
The trap to avoid
The most common mistake we see is reaching for F2 because it's cheap and assuming it unlocks free viewing. It doesn't — the free-viewer benefit is an F64-and-above feature, full stop. Buying F2 to 'save on Pro licences' just gives you a small, throttled capacity and a pile of viewers who still each need a Pro licence. If free viewing is your goal, the only honest options are F64 or larger, and at that point the maths only works if you genuinely have the viewer numbers to justify it.
The migration itself is rarely the hard part. Getting the licensing decision right — viewer counts, author counts, reserved versus pay-as-you-go, and whether you'll lean on the rest of Fabric — is what separates a clean transition from a budget surprise at renewal.