Power BI Premium is a capacity-based license. If you have a large group of end-users, then the way that read-only license works for them is that you assign them a Power BI Free account for each, and then share the content inside a workspace that is assigned to a Power BI Premium licensed capacity. Read-Only License for Big Group of End-Users Let’s now start from a big group, and move along down to the small group of the audience. Depends on the number of end-users, you have different options to choose from. The second thing you need to understand is that the licensing plan is different if you share the report with five people, 200 people, or 20K people. There are Different Plans Depends on the Number of End-Users

You need to pay for it, it is not free, but it is cheaper than developer license for sure. Having a read-only license doesn’t mean having it for free. That means any user who has access to the Power BI content (report) somehow should be part of a paid plan license of Power BI.

Unless you share content publicly using Publish to Web, which is not a possible method for organizational and confidential data anyways, in this article, we are not talking about public reports sharing. The first thing you need to understand in the world of licensing for Power BI is that sharing a Power BI content is NOT free.

To answer this question, I first need to take you through some facts, explain how they are working, and then answer the question in detail.

You don’t want to pay the developer license for them, what is the read-only license for Power BI that they can use? you build a report or two, and now want to share it with end-users. You have two types of users of Power BI at least in every organization users who build reports (let’s call them developers), and users who don’t build the report, but use the reports build by the first group, we call this second group, end-users. So here I am going to talk about this only: The Read-Only license for Power BI. I have written about Licensing in Power BI previously, however, I believe that the article is not explaining it clearly enough and there are still some questions around it. In most of my presentations all around the world, I still get this question often: “Is there a Read-Only license for Power BI?”, and often starts with “I have some end-users, who are not building any reports, I don’t want to pay for Developer License for them”.

Power bi licensing options