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Consultant KB for Microsoft Power BI: semantic models, DAX and modelling, Power Query and dataflows, reports and visuals, the service and workspaces, capacity and performance, embedding and integration, governance and security, ALM and deployment, and licensing, plus cross-cutting decision guides. Scoped to Power BI, with Microsoft Fabric covered where it touches Power BI directly. Implementation notes, configuration decisions and the gotchas that bite on real projects. Populated by the daily author agent from the Power BI release plans, docs repo and product blog, plus the author's own consultant notes.

power-bi/10-licensing/feature-free-users-and-viewing.md
feature-free-users-and-viewing.mdv2 · history
CurrentApplies to AllUpdated last weekSource Microsoft Learn ↗

What it does

A free Fabric licence lets someone build and use content for themselves in My workspace, and view and interact with content colleagues have shared — provided that content is hosted on a qualifying capacity. It's the licence that carries the bulk of the audience in any large deployment.

Key facts

  • What a free user can do depends on three things at once: their licence, their role or permissions, and where the content is stored. All three have to line up.
  • Free users can create content in their own My workspace. They can't publish to app workspaces or share with others.
  • Viewing shared content requires the content to be on a qualifying capacity — Microsoft states Fabric F64 or larger, or Premium. On shared capacity, viewing someone else's content needs Pro or PPU.
  • Free users get the Viewer role. Any other workspace role requires Pro or PPU.
  • Both the report and its underlying semantic model must be on the qualifying capacity. If the report is and the model isn't, the free user gets a prompt to upgrade rather than a report.
  • A free user with no role in a capacity workspace also gets the upgrade prompt. Capacity alone doesn't grant access.
  • Access can arrive through a workspace role or through an app the creator has published and granted them.
  • In sovereign cloud environments with a qualifying capacity, Microsoft documents that all users can view content without an assigned licence, with regional variation — check the regional documentation rather than assuming.
  • A user can hold several licences; the service applies the most permissive.
  • Microsoft maintains a per-feature table of exactly what a free licence can do in the service. Use it rather than reasoning from first principles.

When to use / skip

This is the licence the whole distribution economy rests on. Any deployment with more than a couple of hundred consumers is going to end up with capacity plus free viewers, and the design work is making sure every piece of content those viewers touch actually sits where it needs to.

Where free users don't work: anywhere the audience needs to build, share, subscribe on someone else's behalf, or collaborate in a workspace. Also anywhere below the capacity threshold. If the client can't get to F64, planning around free viewers is planning around something they don't have.

Configuration decisions

  • Whether distribution happens through apps or through direct workspace access. Apps are almost always the right answer for free viewers and give you a cleaner permission story.
  • Where the semantic models live. This is the decision that most often breaks free viewing, and it's usually made for modelling reasons by someone not thinking about licences.
  • Whether any free user genuinely needs more — export, subscription management, personal bookmarks — because that's the trigger to upgrade individuals rather than everyone.
  • How My workspace is governed, given free users can build there and nobody can see what they build.
  • Whether the tenant permits individual paid trials, since a free user hitting an upgrade prompt may be able to self-serve into Pro.

Gotchas

  • The model-must-be-on-capacity rule. A shared enterprise model in a Pro workspace turns every downstream free viewer into an upgrade prompt, and the error message doesn't explain why.
  • Below F64, capacity buys performance and nothing else. Clients hear "we bought capacity" and expect free viewing at any size.
  • A free user with capacity content but no workspace role sees the same upgrade prompt as an unlicensed user. Two very different problems, one message.
  • My workspace content is effectively invisible to governance. Free users building there is fine until something important lives there.
  • Sovereign cloud behaviour differs and varies by region. Don't generalise from a commercial-cloud deployment.

Consultant notes

  • Test with a genuinely free account before go-live, not with your own admin account. This finds the model-placement problem while it's still cheap to fix.
  • When someone reports "it asks me to upgrade", the diagnostic order is: is the report on capacity, is the model on capacity, does this person have a role. Three checks, and it's nearly always the second.
  • Push distribution through apps. It's a better consumer experience and it makes the permission model something you can explain in a slide.
  • Free viewers can still export and screenshot. If the client's concern is data leaving, licensing isn't the control — sensitivity labels and RLS are.

The free-viewing capacity threshold is the number to recheck — everything else in this doc hangs off it

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