Free tool · 2 minutes · Power BI · Australia
POWER BI PRO VS PREMIUM —
THE BREAK-EVEN IN AUD.
Three licensing shapes, one decision: Pro for everyone, Premium Per User for everyone, or a Fabric capacity with free viewers. Slide your seat count, split authors from viewers, and this calculator shows the monthly cost of each shape and the seat counts where the answer flips.
Price assumptions (AUD / month, ex GST): edit from your CSP quote
All seats on ProCheapest
$1,370 / month
$16,440 / year · 100 seats × $13.70
All seats on Premium Per User
$3,420 / month
$41,040 / year · 100 seats × $34.20 (Pro users can't consume PPU content, so viewers need PPU too)
Fabric capacity (F64+) + Pro for authors
$13,074 / month
$156,888 / year · $12,800 capacity + 20 authors × $13.70; 80 viewers consume free
Break-even seat counts
- PPU costs $20.50 / seat / month more than Pro ($246 a year per seat).
- With 20 authors, a Fabric capacity at $12,800 / month becomes cheaper than all-Pro from 955 total seats, and cheaper than all-PPU from 383 total seats.
- Capacity note: viewer-free consumption starts at F64. Smaller F-SKUs (F2 to F32) still require Pro for every consumer, so they don't change the per-user maths; they add capacity features only.
Indicative AUD list figures ex GST, with the capacity default quoted at pay-as-you-go. Microsoft adjusts regional pricing without notice and CSP or EA pricing differs from list, so confirm binding numbers on your quote before committing.
Frequently asked questions
What Australian teams ask about Power BI licensing.
What's the price difference between Power BI Pro and Premium Per User in Australia?
Indicative AUD list pricing is about $13.70 per user per month for Pro and about $34.20 for Premium Per User (PPU), both ex GST, a gap of roughly $20.50 per seat per month or about $246 a year. Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5, which changes the maths for E5 tenants: their Pro seats are effectively already paid for. Confirm current figures at purchase, as Microsoft sets AUD regional pricing.
When is Premium Per User worth the extra cost?
When the workload genuinely needs a PPU-only capability: semantic models over Pro's 1 GB limit, 48 scheduled refreshes a day instead of eight, paginated reports, deployment pipelines or XMLA read-write. The catch is consumption: Pro users can't open content in a PPU workspace, so one PPU workload usually means PPU licences for every consumer of that content rather than only the authors. That multiplier is what this calculator makes visible.
What's the Fabric capacity alternative?
Instead of licensing every user, a Microsoft Fabric F-SKU capacity hosts the content for a fixed monthly fee. From F64 upward, viewers consume reports with a free licence and only authors still need Pro. Fabric capacity has effectively replaced Power BI Premium P-SKUs for new purchases. Below F64 (F2 to F32), every consumer still needs Pro, so small capacities add features rather than changing the per-user cost.
At what seat count does a capacity become cheaper?
It depends on the capacity price and your author-to-viewer ratio, which is why the calculator computes it from your inputs. As a shape: an F64 at the indicative pay-as-you-go figure of about $12,800 AUD a month beats all-Pro once viewers reach the high hundreds, and beats all-PPU at a few hundred total seats. Almost nobody buys F64 at pay-as-you-go, though: a one-year reservation typically takes 30 to 40 per cent off and pulls the all-Pro crossover down toward the 500-viewer mark. Put your CSP quote in the capacity field and read the thresholds from your own numbers.
Are these prices exact?
No. Pro, PPU and capacity defaults are the indicative AUD figures Frontrow has published, ex GST, with the F64 default (~$12,800 a month) quoted at pay-as-you-go. Reserved capacity pricing runs materially lower and is agreement-specific. Every price field is editable, and the binding number is whatever your CSP or Enterprise Agreement quote says.
We're on Microsoft 365 E5. Does any of this apply?
Yes, with one large discount: E5 already includes Power BI Pro for every licensed user, so the all-Pro column is largely money you've spent. The live question for E5 tenants is whether specific workloads justify PPU on top, or whether growth in viewers and refresh demands justifies a Fabric capacity. Set the Pro price to $0 in the assumptions to model the E5 position.