Microsoft has consolidated its licensing terms for Power BI with its Fabric data platform, leaving some users facing steep price hikes according to one analyst.

Microsoft will integrate Power BI licensing with Fabric

In a statement earlier this month, Kim Manis, Microsoft’s Fabric and Power BI product management veep, announced changes to the licensing terms for the popular analytics and data visualization platform.

The changes are designed to consolidate licensing for Power BI – a set of business analytics and visualization tools that have been around since 2015 – with Fabric, a broader data platform launched last year within which Power BI becomes a component.

Andrew Snodgrass, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, has pointed out that while the changes are “not entirely a bad thing,” there are a couple of changes that could provide some nasty surprises for some Power BI users.

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The expensive surprises to users

The move makes the users lose the dual-use rights, which allow them to deploy in the cloud and on-prem Power BI Report Server under the same agreement. Under this circumstance, users will need SQL Server Enterprise edition per-core licenses and maintain Software Assurance to cover on-prem subscriptions, which is “at an increased price.”

But how much? The entry-level Power BI Premium P starts from around $5,000 per month.

What’s more, the lower-cost options for read-only are disappearing. These are used when businesses want to give users — in a warehouse, for example — access to a dashboard on a screen without accessing the full environment. Under the old regime, they were covered by an EM or A SKUs including Premium EM1 through EM3 SKUs or Azure Power BI Embedded A1 through A5 SKUs.

However, in the new world, the lower Fabric F SKUs (F32 and lower) do not cover the platform’s read-only users. Instead, these customers will need to license their Power BI read-only users with Power BI Pro licenses, according to Andrew.