I am running a Power BI workshop this week, with a focus on Data Governance and Administration. Power BI Premium will get special attention, so I was searching for the latest resources. As I was looking for a pricing table of the different Power BI Premium Capacity nodes, I encountered a series of frictions in user experience, that may be worth sharing. If you are a potential buyer of Power BI Premium, this post is for you – Especially if you tried to purchase a capacity node, but couldn’t find how.
The bottom line
If you are in a hurry to buy Power BI Premium, here is all you need to know: As a Billing Admin in your O365 tenant, purchasing Power BI Premium from the portal may be confusing. Till the experience is improved, you can purchase Power BI Premium directly from these Office Portal links (Thank you Adam Wilson for sharing, and for the update below):
What is the price of a specific Power BI Premium Node?
Is there a simple way to figure out the price of a specific Power BI Premium Node? Currently no. You can figure out the price by using the calculator.
While the calculator here can help find the required nodes and their price, I was trying to find a page with a simple table that will combine both pricing and performance information. The table below is based on this source – but the Monthly Cost was not available anywhere, and I was too lazy to apply reverse-engineering to find the cost of each node).
How to Purchase Power BI Premium?
So, I decided to follow the purchasing experience of an Office 365 Billing Administrator (You need to be a Global or Billing Admin in your Office 365 tenant, to purchase Power BI Premium, or go through the Volume Licensing route, which is not cover in this article, Learn here about the different O365 admin roles.). Follow this walk through to purchase Power BI Premium P1, P2 or P3 nodes.
Login to Power BI, and click on the Settings icon, then click Admin portal.
In Admin portal, select Premium settings, and click Purchase. If you don’t see the Purchase option, proceed to the next step.
If you don’t see the purchase option, it probably means you are not defined as a Power BI service administrator by your Office 365 Global Administrator. If you think you should have access to the Admin portal, learn more about it here to figure out the next steps.
So, you are both a Billing and Power BI service administrator in your O365 tenant. Great! Let’s move on. After clicking Purchase in Admin portal of Power BI, you will be redirected to the following page. Unfortunately, there is no Power BI Premium here. But please don’t lose hope, as I did.
Following Guy in A Cube video here, I realized that we should just scroll down to find the Power BI Premium Capacity node.
So, let’s scroll down. The list seems to be alphabetically ordered. So, you can scroll down fast till the letter “P”. At about the middle of the list, you will find Power BI Pro and Power BI (free), followed by OneDrive for Business (Plan 2) – But Where are the Power BI Premium nodes?
The answer lies further down. All you need is the determination to keep scrolling down, till you find Power BI Premium P2, and one row below Power BI Premium P3. Where is P1?
By now you know the answer – Scroll down a bit more to find Power BI Premium P1.
Note: I still didn’t figure out how to find the embedded nodes (EM1, EM2, EM3). But let’s assume we want to buy P1.
Hover your mouse over the Power BI Premium node, and click Buy now.
Congratulations!
Few more nuances that can be fixed
You can skip this section, and jump right to the Conclusions section. I am sharing it, in case Microsoft we will want to improve the experience. So, I clicked the Buy now, and now I am on this page. Anyone can tell me, what is Plan b0af1?
Clicking the Learn more below the Buy now, leads to an Office 365 Plan comparison page which is not related to Power BI in any direct way.
Conclusions
The purchasing experience of Power BI Premium through O365 portal has room for improvement. You should remember to scroll down till you find the right Capability node, and don’t stop scrolling down if you miss your item. It is not placed in the list by alphabetic order.
I have shared this experience with the Power BI team, who confirmed that they are already working on an improved experience, that will be released in the near future. Till the experience is improved, I was offered to share the following links to Power BI Premium Capacity Nodes (Thank you Adam again):
