With the release of Azure Fabric capacities in June 2023, Microsoft has introduced a way for businesses to centrally provision Fabric capacity for Power BI use, rather than licensing individual users. This new setup allows organizations to activate and deactivate Fabric based on their specific business needs. This offers enhanced flexibility and cost control.

Microsoft Fabric’s SKUs range widely, from around £200 to £241,000 per month (based on 730 hours of usage). This makes it accessible to businesses of all sizes and budgets. For example, a small business that only needs data integrations and Power BI reporting during business hours (about 175 hours per month) would incur a cost of approximately £56.52.

The Microsoft Fabric SKU includes the tools needed to deploy a Lakehouse and begin building data integration pipelines and data flows. All data is stored in a Storage Account Gen2. This which is integrated into the Lakehouse service and costs £0.0185 per GB per month.

If your organization needs to create and distribute Power BI reports, users will require at least a Power BI Pro license. This costs £10 per user per month. Even with this added cost, the total cost of ownership remains significantly lower than comparable enterprise-level data integration solutions—which typically don’t include Power BI.

For small to medium-sized businesses seeking an affordable and scalable solution for data integration, Microsoft Fabric is an ideal fit. This is due to its seamless integration with existing Azure and Microsoft products.

If you’re interested in implementing Microsoft Fabric or exploring how it could optimize your current data integration strategy, please reach out to Kabeelah for guidance tailored to your business.