Power BI Embedded bills by the capacity hour.
Outgrow your tier and you choose: slow reports or a bigger bill.
Power BI has excellent visualizations and deep Microsoft ecosystem integration. For ISVs embedding analytics in a customer-facing product, the core problem is the billing model: A SKUs are fixed capacity billed hourly, and how much capacity you need is driven by your customers' usage, not you. A traffic spike, a product launch, a big customer's busy quarter — reports slow down until you move to a larger SKU, and your cost goes up. When you can't predict the bill, you can't build a stable business model around it.
Why capacity billing breaks down for ISVs
The model that works for internal enterprise BI creates a structural problem when your customers' usage determines your cost.
Your customers control your cost
When a large customer has a busy quarter, their dashboard usage climbs. Your capacity needs climb with it — and so does your bill once you size up. That's not a cost you can predict, control, or cleanly pass through in your pricing. Your gross margins are determined in part by how much your customers choose to use their analytics — and you have no say in that number.
Traffic spikes become slowdowns — or bigger invoices
A product launch, a major customer campaign, a viral feature — these events drive analytics traffic up fast. With flat pricing, growth is pure upside. With A SKU billing, a good month means overloaded capacity: A SKUs are a fixed size billed hourly with no built-in autoscale, so reports slow down until you manually move to a larger SKU at 2–4× the cost. One excellent quarter can blow your unit economics for the year.
Azure lock-in — your reports don't travel
Power BI reports, data models, and workspace configurations use native Power BI formats tied to the Azure stack. If you need to change platforms, move infrastructure, or reduce Microsoft dependency, you're not migrating configuration — you're rebuilding your entire analytics layer from scratch. The exit cost isn't theoretical; it's a full re-implementation of every embedded report your customers use.
Fabric adds SKU and licensing complexity
P SKUs have not been sold to new customers since July 2024, and Microsoft is steering ISVs toward Fabric F SKUs as the modern option. For embedding for your customers (app owns data), neither F nor A SKUs require end-user licenses — 500 external users on an F8 run about $625/month reserved ($1,051 pay-as-you-go) plus $0 in user licensing. The nuance: Power BI Pro ($14/user/month) is still required for report publishers and for embed-for-your-organization below F64. Either way, you pay hourly for provisioned capacity.
Power BI Embedded vs Yurbi — for ISVs
Evaluated on the dimensions that matter for a customer-facing embedded analytics product.
Power BI Embedded A SKU pricing sourced from Microsoft Azure pricing page and community-verified figures (October 2026; Central US, never paused). Yurbi pricing from yurbi.com/pricing/. A SKU costs are billed hourly; annual commitment reservations available at a discount.
Power BI Embedded vs Yurbi — direct answers
Power BI Embedded uses Azure A SKUs — capacity-based tiers billed hourly. A1 runs approximately $740/month at continuous use. A2 runs approximately $1,470/month. A3 runs approximately $2,940/month (Central US, never paused). You pay hourly for the capacity tier you've provisioned — not per render, and not a fixed number of users. There's no built-in autoscale. As your customers' usage grows, you need larger capacity tiers to avoid throttling — meaning your costs scale with behavior you don't control.
Yurbi charges a flat annual rate: $10,000/year (Starter, up to 75 users), $18,000/year (Growth, up to 250 users), $24,000/year (Scale, up to 500 users), $30,000/year (Unlimited). Same price whether your customers run 10 reports or 10,000. See yurbi.com/pricing for the full breakdown.
Microsoft stopped selling P SKUs to new customers in July 2024, steering them to Microsoft Fabric F SKUs. There's some good news for ISVs on A SKUs: Microsoft walked back the plan to force A SKU users into Fabric. A SKUs are preserved for external-user embedding without per-user licensing requirements.
The same holds for Fabric F SKUs: when you embed for your customers (app owns data), no end-user licenses are needed on any F SKU. An ISV with 500 external users on F8 capacity pays about $625/month reserved ($1,051 pay-as-you-go) plus $0 in user licensing. Power BI Pro ($14/user/month) is needed only for report publishers and for embed-for-your-organization scenarios below F64 — a distinction worth confirming for your architecture. If you're evaluating Fabric today, understand the full licensing stack before committing.
Power BI Embedded is an Azure cloud service — it cannot run on-premise or on your customers' servers. Power BI Report Server is a separate Microsoft product that runs on-premise, but it's not the same product, has significant feature limitations versus Power BI Embedded, and is not designed for ISV multi-tenant embedding at scale.
If your customers have data residency requirements, private cloud mandates, or on-premise security policies — Power BI Embedded cannot meet those requirements. Your entire embedded analytics deployment lives on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. Yurbi is self-hosted only: Windows, Linux, or Docker on your own infrastructure or your customers'. Your data never passes through our servers.
Power BI has a broader chart library and more polished default visualizations than Yurbi — that's accurate and worth acknowledging. The question for ISV embedding is whether that difference matters for your specific product. Most customer-facing embedded analytics products use 8–12 chart types that cover the substantial majority of end-user needs. Yurbi has 20+ chart types and a custom visualization API for cases where you need something specific.
If your core value proposition depends on AI-generated insights, natural language query, or Microsoft Copilot integration (which requires F2+ / P1+ capacity, not A SKUs) — Power BI has a real and meaningful lead that's worth the trade-offs. If your core need is multi-tenant self-service analytics with predictable cost and self-hosted deployment, Yurbi is purpose-built for that. The visualization gap matters less than it appears when the billing model is structurally wrong for your business.
Being direct: Yurbi has no AI or Copilot analytics features yet — that's on the roadmap. Fewer visualization types than Power BI's full library. No native Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, or Azure integration. Embedding is iframe and API only — no JavaScript SDK for deeply programmatic in-page interactivity. SSO is session-token based via the DoLogin API (plus Windows/AD and header-based SSO), with two-factor sign-in (app, email, or text), Cisco Duo, breached-password screening, and lockout; native SAML/OIDC is in development. Dashboard interactivity uses global filters and drill-down, not associative click-through filtering between widgets. Mobile is functional but not a differentiating feature. ARM architecture not currently supported.
We'd rather you know these things now than discover them post-implementation. Tell us in a demo and we'll give you an honest fit assessment rather than work around the question.
Using Power BI for your internal team's analytics is a fundamentally different decision than embedding it in a product your customers pay for. Internal BI has predictable usage, single-tenant requirements, and a simpler billing relationship where your own team's behavior drives cost. Customer-facing embedded analytics has unpredictable usage patterns, multi-tenant isolation requirements, and the capacity billing problem described on this page.
Your internal Power BI investment doesn't obligate you to use Power BI Embedded externally. Many ISVs use Power BI internally for their own operations and a separate embedded analytics platform for their customer-facing product. The evaluation criteria are genuinely different — don't let internal familiarity be the deciding factor for a customer-facing infrastructure decision.
The honest answer: more work than switching between similar platforms, less than people initially fear. Power BI reports (.pbix files) use a proprietary format that doesn't migrate directly to Yurbi — you're rebuilding your report library in Yurbi's interface. For most ISVs with a defined set of customer-facing reports, that's a contained rebuild, not an open-ended project. Your data doesn't move because Yurbi queries your existing databases directly.
The pattern we see: ISVs run a Yurbi trial alongside their existing deployment, rebuild their top reports as a validation test, and cut over on their next renewal cycle. Download the trial and test with your actual data — that's a faster way to scope migration effort than any comparison document.
