Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence platform. Its website describes a unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise BI. You can connect to and visualize any data, and place the visuals inside the apps you use every day.
What Power BI offers
This information comes from Microsoft's Power BI product page, its pricing page and Microsoft Learn, read on October 24, 2026. Microsoft's prices change with currency and region; the checkout page has the final figure.
| Power BI product or license | Microsoft's description | Microsoft page |
|---|---|---|
| Power BI Desktop | Free download for building data models, writing queries and designing reports | Get Power BI Desktop |
| Power BI Pro | Per-user subscription for creating and publishing reports; see Microsoft for the price | Pricing |
| Premium Per User | Per-user subscription with more capacity; see Microsoft for the price | Pricing |
| Power BI Embedded | A pay-as-you-go service for developers who embed interactive reports in their own apps. The website says analytics costs as little as $1 per hour | Power BI website |
| Microsoft Fabric | An end-to-end analytics solution covering data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data science and real-time analytics. Power BI is its business intelligence layer | Microsoft Fabric |
The pricing page warns that prices shown are for marketing purposes and vary by currency, country and region. The price at checkout is the actual price. Power BI licenses can be mixed. For example, you can buy Premium or Fabric capacity to host popular reports, and Pro licenses for people who create and publish reports. Microsoft also offers free self-paced training and sample reports.
Who it is for
Power BI serves teams from individuals to large enterprises:
- Business analysts who connect data, build models and make reports in Power BI Desktop.
- Enterprises that use Microsoft 365 and Fabric and want to share reports inside the Microsoft ecosystem.
- Product developers who embed interactive reports in their own software with Power BI Embedded.
A weekly brand social report in Power BI
Marketing teams often report every week on how much their brand and its competitors posted on each social network and how those posts performed. Many of these companies already run Microsoft 365, so the Power BI service is the natural place for the report.
- Collect. Use the EveryInfra endpoints for Instagram account posts, Facebook page posts, LinkedIn company pages and followers and Threads posts to pull last week's posts and engagement per account.
- Land the data. A script writes the results to a database or files, and Power BI Desktop connects through Get Data. For JSON files, the Power Query JSON connector expands them into tables. Microsoft's documentation notes that
Web.ContentsPOST requests only work with anonymous access, while EveryInfra needs anAuthorization: Bearerheader, so letting a script fetch the data first is the safer route. - Refresh. Set a scheduled refresh in the Power BI service. Microsoft documents up to 8 refreshes a day on Pro and up to 48 on Premium Per User and capacity. If nobody opens a report on the semantic model for two months, the schedule pauses (details). One refresh a day is plenty for a weekly report.
- Present. Compare engagement rate by network and account, list the top posts on one page, and share it with the team on Monday morning.
EveryInfra does not charge for accounts that return nothing new, so a weekly pull stays cheap. Unit prices are on the pricing page.
Where to start on the Microsoft side
Power BI Desktop is a free download, so you can build the report template locally first. For sharing and scheduled refresh, pick Pro or a capacity license on the pricing page. Licensing and service terms are Microsoft's; this page only restates what Microsoft publishes.