Adopting Power BI cost can offer significant value, but organizations often underestimate the true cost of implementing it.
Beyond the obvious licensing fees, critical budget considerations like training, support, IT infrastructure, and headcount tend to get overlooked.
To help you allocate budget properly for a successful Power BI rollout, we’ll overview the major hidden costs to account for.
Understanding these expenses upfront and planning for them in your budget can make an immense difference in achieving the hoped-for ROI from Power BI.
Key Things to Budget For With Power BI
When evaluating Power BI, the most apparent expense is licensing fees. Still, there are various other overhead costs that can quickly add up.
If you don’t budget for these items, the total cost of ownership can greatly exceed expectations.
Here are the essential hidden costs to factor into your Power BI budget:
Training & Enablement
Enabling users to build reports and leverage insights requires training. The level of education needed will depend on the use case, user persona, and how much self-service BI you want to enable.
Typical training costs will include:
- Instructor-led training – Classroom or virtual sessions with a live instructor. Costs $125-$300 per student per day.
- Online courses – Self-paced eLearning through platforms like Udemy or LinkedIn Learning. Around $30 per month per license.
- Learning management system – An platform like Cornerstone or Litmos to manage and track training. Roughly $3-$8 per user a month.
- Change management support – Programs to drive training adoption and skill development. Can run $5,000+ per initiative.
You’ll need to train both casual report consumers and power users who create dashboards and content. Don’t overlook this, as untrained users leads to unused software.
Support & Maintenance
You’ll inevitably need technical support to keep Power BI running smoothly. Options for coverage include:
- Per incident support – Pay by the ticket from Microsoft or a partner. Approximately $275 per incident.
- Annual support contract – Unlimited 24/7 support for a flat annual fee. Around 20% of license costs.
- In-house admin – Hire a FT admin or DBA. $75k+ per resource.
Ensure you have prompt access to troubleshooting when issues emerge. Support costs quickly compound otherwise.
Infrastructure & Hosting
Power BI’s infrastructure requirements can’t be overlooked. Core expenses include:
- Data warehouse – If you lack one, estimate $5k-$15k per TB hosted in Azure. Comes with compute and storage costs.
- Gateway server – On-prem data access requires a gateway. Estimate around $1,500 per server.
- Capacity add-ons – More usage requires capacity licenses. Start at $625/month.
- Azure consumption – Dataflow ETLs, AI models, and gateway bandwidth incur cloud usage fees.
Plan for the underlying data infrastructure Power BI will rely on. It likely already exists but requires assessment.
Administration & Operations
Ongoing oversight of Power BI comes with overhead like:
- Data steward – Curating data sources and access needs IT support. $60-$90k per head.
- Governance programs – Governing usage/security multiplies tasks for IT staff.
- Monitoring – Watching system health requires logging and analytics.
- Business continuity – Backup/restore capabilities to ensure 24/7 availability.
Factor dedicated staffing and programs to manage Power BI after deployment. This is crucial but easy to underestimate.
Licensing & Subscription Costs
Finally, don’t underestimate direct licensing expenses:
- Upfront costs – Buying enough Pro and Premium capacity licenses to meet demand.
- User-based fees – Per user pricing for features like Analyze in Excel.
- Subscription terms – Multi-year commitments may alter costs.
- Growth buffer – Buffer for more users over time avoids capacity issues.
Carefully model capacity needs plus any supplemental license requirements. Allow room for growth to ensure high adoption.
Conclusion
The true cost of Power BI reaches far beyond just software licenses. Training, support, infrastructure, operations/administration, and licensing all play critical roles in budget planning.
Failure to allocate for these hidden expenses is one of the biggest reasons Power BI implementations fail to meet ROI expectations. By understanding the full scope of investments needed, you can plan accordingly and set your Power BI program up for maximum value and success.
To recap, be sure to account for:
- User training and enablement
- Ongoing technical support needs
- Underlying infrastructure requirements
- Administrative overhead for operations
- Sufficient licensing and capacity
