Something that some people search for is the question “Why is Power BI Free?”. Power BI is free because it benefits Microsoft to have an easy on-ramp to Power BI and to attract as large an audience as possible. It is in their financial interest.

If you are wondering what the catch is, the catch is that the free version of Power BI has very limited sharing capabilities, among other features.

In this post, I’m going to cover some reasons why Microsoft would make Power BI free. But before we can elaborate on all of that, we need to clarify what we mean by “free”. Read my post from last week for more details.

So why is it free?

So why would it behoove Microsoft to provide a limited free version of Power BI? Some ideas come to mind:

• People can learn for free. This is important since Microsoft is aiming for a broader audience instead of a deeper one. The main target audience for Power BI is the everyday business user, not BI developers.
• People are skeptical. It can be hard to convince a business to make a large investment in a BI product. By having a free version, a small group of people can do a pilot project without spending any money.
• Razors-and-blades sales model. Companies will often sell products at a loss or give them away for free, if there is a paid compliment needed to take advantage of that product. Think about how cheap printers are, but how expensive ink is, for example.
• SaaS is where they make their money. Related to the previous item, Microsoft makes a lot of their money these days from subscriptions. It used to be that they primarily sold software as standalone packages. But in the last few years, they are making more and more money from  Saas like Office 365, or cloud computing like Azure. Power BI fits neatly into that space.
• Free dashboards are good marketing. Some people will make really cool and innovative dashboards and then share them publicly. This doesn’t detract from Microsoft’s business model at all. Free users are free marketing.

Overall, Power BI is free because so much of the real value comes from the enterprise collaboration and sharing. You can make beautiful visuals with a lot of tools, but few compare to the IT Governance story that Microsoft has.

If you are using R as a data source, you may want to be able to refresh the data or run that R script on a schedule. However, if you try to configure a On-premises Data Gateway to refresh the data source, you will see this error.

Extension{"extensionDataSourceKind":"R","extensionDataSourcePath":"R"} Cannot be added to gateway

Back in August 2016, Microsoft added support for refreshing R scripts but only  for the personal data gateway. So, in order to schedule a refresh where you are using R, you need to install and configure an on-premises data gateway in personal mode. The Microsoft documentation for r query steps reflects this limitation as well.

A recent viewer of my new Pluralsight course had a question about data gateways and Power BI Premium. Specifically, do you need a pro license to install and administer data gateways? The short answer is probably not!

Installing data gateways

So when you install a data gateway, you need to log in as a user to register it with your tenant. Well it turns out that whoever is used there is set as the default admin for that gateway. I created a user with just a power BI free license, and I was able to install and administer that gateway just fine. I was also able to assign it to other gateways that already existed.

So, for normal usage you don’t have to be licensed with pro to setup and configure data gateways. I was honestly a bit surprised by this, but in retrospect is makes sense. Pro licensing is all about consuming reports.

What about Premium?

So, the original question was about Power BI Premium. Unfortunately, there’s no developer tier for me to test on, but I have a few guesses.

First, I reviewed the white paper and the distinction it makes between pro users and infrequent users is about producing versus consuming reports. It doesn’t really talk much about administration from what I could tell. Same thing for the faq:

Do I need Power BI Pro to use Power BI Premium?
Yes. Power BI Pro is required to publish reports, share dashboards, collaborate with colleagues in workspaces and engage in other related activities.

Next, I did some searching, and found a page about capacity admins, but that doesn’t relate to data gateways specifically.

So based on what I found, I would assume that you don’t need a pro license to manage data gateways for premium. I would assume it would be a similar experience to normal Power BI.