How does licencing for Sharepoint (BI tools) on O365 work?

Question

I'm looking at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/pricing/buy-bi.aspx

The PowerBI addon licence grants me the following extra features:

• BI Sites
• Scheduled Data Refresh
• Data Stewardship
• Mobile BI Service
• Natural Language Query

While the E3 plan offers

• Data Discovery and Access
• Modeling and Analysis
• Visualization

Questions:

• What additional features do I get with a BI Site that I dont get on the E3 plan (since E3 includes Data Discovery,Access,Modelling,Analysis and Visualization)?

• Do I need to pay for the PowerBI addin per user, or can I pay for it only for the administrator and let everyone make use of Mobile BI,Data Refresh,etc (with the administrator creating reports)?

• How does the licensing work if I wish to allow a few hundred users to view PowerPivot reports? Do I need to pay $20/month/user, $40/month/user or some other amount? This seems to become very expensive very fast

Answer 1

I have not yet had time to explore the full functionality but my understanding is PowerBI add:

• Larger workbook sizes for online viewing
• Ability to connect to data sources on-premise
• A new "PowerBI" site template is available.

The biggest take away is probably the ability to utilize on premise data sources. I'd be curious to to see if anyone that is actually using it will have any further input.