💁 About this article
This article is part of Fugo’s Power BI knowledge base: a collection of resources answering common Power BI questions. We include notes throughout where Fugo’s integration may be helpful for displaying dashboards on digital signage.
Table of contents
The uncomfortable truth
Power BI isn’t expensive by accident.
Microsoft didn’t arbitrarily decide that viewers should need licenses. Power BI is priced the way it is because every report view triggers real, ongoing costs behind the scenes.
Those costs include:
Secure authentication and authorization, including Azure AD and row-level security checks
Scheduled and on-demand refresh, often pulling data from external systems
Compute and memory usage, especially for complex models
Governance and auditing, which enterprises expect by default
When someone opens a report in the Power BI Service, they’re not just “looking at a chart.” They’re consuming infrastructure.
Any method that avoids paying usually avoids one of those pillars: security, freshness, scalability, or control.
Why “just one license” doesn’t work
A common instinct is to ask:
“Can’t we just have one licensed account and let everyone view the reports?”
Power BI explicitly disallows this through its licensing terms. Specifically, it prohibits:
Shared logins
License reuse across multiple people
Multiplexing, where one licensed user acts as a proxy for many
This isn’t a technical restriction - it’s a contractual one.
Microsoft’s position is simple: if multiple people are benefiting from Power BI, multiple people need to be licensed unless you’re paying for a capacity-based model instead.
That’s why so many “clever” setups work briefly and then break, get flagged, or stop scaling. They were never designed to be compliant long-term.
Why Power BI sharing workarounds keep showing up
If Power BI licensing is so clear, why do the same questions keep appearing on Reddit and the Fabric forums?
Because Power BI is excellent at analysis, but far less opinionated about distribution. Most teams aren’t trying to dodge licensing out of bad faith. They’re reacting to real operational friction.
They want:
Dashboards that run all day, not just during meetings
Data that’s visible without logging in
Fewer brittle workflows involving exports, emails, and reminders
Something that works in shared spaces, not just individual browsers
When Power BI doesn’t quite meet those needs on its own, people reach for whatever does:
PowerPoint decks running in slideshow mode
PDFs emailed on a schedule
Screenshots captured by scripts
Public links embedded behind intranet logins
These aren’t signs of laziness! Rather, they're signals that the reporting tool and the delivery medium are being asked to do different jobs.
The missing layer: delivery
At its core, Power BI answers one primary question very well:
“Who is allowed to access this data?”
What it doesn’t try to solve is a different question:
“How does this stay visible, reliably, in the real world?”
That question shows up the moment dashboards leave a personal context and enter a shared one.
A wall-mounted TV doesn’t:
Have a keyboard or mouse
Belong to a single user
Prompt someone to log in when it refreshes
Recover gracefully if a browser crashes
Power BI is simply stopping where its responsibility ends.
Digital signage can fill that gap
Digital signage can act as the much-needed delivery layer around it.
Platforms like Fugo exist because:
Screens aren’t browsers
Offices aren’t laptops
Dashboards aren’t presentations
Instead of asking each viewer to open Power BI, digital signage flips the model:
Authenticate once, centrally
Respect existing Power BI permissions and security
Render dashboards for passive, shared viewing
Keep content running without human intervention
Power BI continues to do what it does best: data modeling, security, refresh logic. Fugo handles the part Power BI intentionally doesn’t: keeping dashboards visible, stable, and unattended on screens.
Bottom line
There’s no magic switch that lets you securely share Power BI reports with everyone for free, but there are better ways to think about how reports are consumed.
If a report matters enough to stay visible - on a wall, in an office, on an operations floor - it usually matters enough to be delivered properly, not held together by workarounds.
That’s the distinction most teams eventually arrive at, whether they plan to or not.
Case study: How Struers scaled their distibution of Power BI reports with digital signage