When a small business asks what a Power BI dashboard costs, the answer has two parts. There is the cost of building it once, and there is the monthly cost of the licences people need to view it. Most surprises come from forgetting the second part, so we will start there.
The licence cost
Power BI Desktop, the tool used to build reports, is free. Sharing is where licences come in. Each person who views a shared report needs a Power BI Pro licence, which costs about $14 per user per month at the time of writing. Prices change, so check Microsoft’s pricing page before you budget.
A team of five people looking at the dashboard would pay around $70 a month in total. If your company is on Microsoft 365 E5, Power BI Pro is already included, so you may have nothing extra to pay.
There is also Premium Per User at about $24 per user per month. Most small businesses do not need it. It becomes useful when your data is very large or you want the dashboard to refresh many times a day.
What decides the build cost
Two dashboards can look similar on screen and take very different amounts of work. Most of that work happens before anything appears on screen.
- Your toolsShopWebAds
- Clean and joinFix gaps, match totals
- Data modelOne set of trusted numbers
- Your dashboardPages that answer real questions
These are the things that move the number most.
- How many data sources there are. One clean spreadsheet is quick. Shopify, Google Analytics and Meta Ads joined together take longer, because each source counts things differently and the totals have to match.
- How clean the data is. Missing dates, duplicate customers and product names spelled three ways all need fixing before the numbers can be trusted.
- How many questions it answers. Each page should answer a real question, like which products make money. More questions means more pages and more checking.
- How fresh the data needs to be. A daily refresh is simple. Near live data needs more setup.
- Who can see what. If sales reps should only see their own customers, that needs extra security rules.
Rough project sizes
Every project is different, but most small business dashboards fall into one of three sizes.
- Small: one or two clean sources and two or three pages. Usually a few days of work.
- Medium: three to five sources, some data cleaning and four to six pages. Usually two to three weeks.
- Larger: many sources, a data pipeline feeding a database, and access rules for different teams. Usually a month or more.
Our e-commerce sales dashboard is a good example of a medium project. It joins orders, website traffic and ad spend so the owner can see which channels actually make money.
How to keep the cost down
- Start with one question. Pick the single question you most want answered every week and build that first. You can add pages later.
- Export your data before the first call. A sample export from each tool lets us judge the cleaning work early, so the quote is accurate.
- Use the licences you already have. Check your Microsoft 365 plan before buying anything new.
- Agree on definitions. Decide what counts as a customer, a sale or a return before the build starts. Changing definitions halfway is the most common cause of extra work.
How we price it
We agree on a fixed price before any work starts, based on a written plan of the sources, pages and refresh schedule. You can read more about how we build Power BI dashboards, or book a free call and we will look at your data and give you an honest estimate.