A public health team at a nonprofit reached out a couple weeks ago wanting to put interactive reports on their public website. The plan was for a handful of staff to build dashboards in Power BI Pro, then embed them so any visitor could filter and explore the data without signing in. They had a rough price in their head based on Power BI Pro seats. The trouble is that the seat price and the public-embedding price are two different questions.
Two different sharing models, two different prices
When people think about Power BI cost, they usually think about Pro licenses: a per-user monthly fee for the people who build and view reports inside the organization. That model works when everyone who touches a report has an account in your tenant. It's predictable, and for a nonprofit it's often heavily discounted or free through the Microsoft nonprofit entitlement.
Publishing to the public is a separate story. When you want an unknown number of anonymous visitors to view a report on your website, you can't hand each of them a Pro license. Instead you're looking at capacity-based licensing, where you pay for the horsepower that serves the reports rather than for named users. That's typically Power BI Embedded or Microsoft Fabric capacity, and it's billed by the hour or month based on the capacity size you reserve.
Internal viewers are priced per person. Public, anonymous viewers are priced by capacity. The second model exists precisely because you can't count or license the audience.
Why a yearly number is hard to pin down
The nonprofit's real frustration was getting a firm annual cost. That's genuinely hard with capacity, because you pay for a running resource, and the annual figure depends on the capacity tier you pick and whether you pause it when it's not in use. It's less like buying a fixed number of seats and more like renting a machine that has to stay on to serve your website. That's the source of the confusion, and it's a fair thing to be confused about.
| Question | Internal viewers | Public anonymous viewers |
|---|---|---|
| Who can see it | People with accounts in your tenant | Anyone on the internet |
| How it's licensed | Per-user (Power BI Pro) | Capacity (Embedded or Fabric) |
| How it's billed | Predictable monthly per seat | By capacity size, often hourly or monthly |
| Yearly cost | Easy to total | Depends on capacity tier and uptime |
Sometimes simpler tooling is the better fit
Here's the part worth sitting with before you commit. This team's data was small, lived in Excel, and updated about once a year. It wasn't a large, fast-moving warehouse. When the data is that light and the goal is a few interactive charts on a website, standing up capacity for public embedding can be more machinery than the job needs. A set of well-built static or lightly interactive web charts, refreshed when the annual data lands, can deliver the same visitor experience for a fraction of the cost and complexity.
None of that is a knock on Power BI or on the tool they were already using. Both are strong for reporting, especially when the underlying data is large, changes often, or connects to other systems. The point is to match the tool to the actual workload. If you're on Microsoft already and your reporting audience is internal, Power BI Pro is an easy call. If your audience is the open internet and your dataset is small, it's worth pricing the lighter option too before you reserve capacity.
If you're weighing this yourself
Nonprofits should start in their own admin center, on the products page, where Power BI Pro and Fabric pricing shows up with the nonprofit discount already applied. That's the path of least resistance for licensing. The harder call is the architecture: internal versus public, and whether the data volume justifies capacity at all.
If you're trying to figure out where your reporting fits between a few Pro seats, public embedding, and something lighter, we're happy to talk it through and help you avoid paying for machinery you don't need.