How Fabric Plan capacity and pricing work
Fabric Plan delivers Planning, PowerTable and Intelligence, deeply integrated with Microsoft Fabric.
Only Active Users Consume Capacity
Fabric Plan is priced on user activity, not on named users. A session starts when a user engages with a Plan item.
Save 55% to 90% on Your Costs
Fabric Plan delivers enterprise planning at a fraction of the cost, with minimal dependency on IT.
- The pricing information presented is based on publicly available data and industry research as of the date of publication.
- Pricing for Fabric Plan assumes 1 Planner : 5 Stakeholders in reserved capacity.
- Vendor pricing is estimated and may vary by year, industry, country, business size, license count, license term, bundling discounts, negotiated agreements or product configurations.
- This comparison reflects Lumel's interpretation and must not be relied upon as definitive. Check pricing directly with each vendor.
Session Types
Fabric Plan meters three session types, and each consumes Fabric capacity at a different rate.
Viewer
- View data in reading view
- Sort, filter and bookmark reports
Stakeholder
- Enter data and collaborate
- Create scenarios and simulations
- Provide approvals and comments
- Save and write back data
- Trigger audit change capture
- Author reference data and tables in PowerTable
- Author reports and dashboards in Intelligence
Planner
- Author planning models and layouts
- Author input templates for data entry
- Configure planning logic, rules and allocations
- Customize security settings and user permissions
Each cell shows the highest level of activity a session type can perform in that sheet type.
| Session type | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheet type | Viewer | Stakeholder | Planner |
| PlanningBudgets, forecasts, scenarios, allocations | View | Contribute | |
| PowerTableReference and master data management | View | ||
| IntelligenceReports, dashboards and analysis | View | ||
Size Your Fabric Capacity
Estimate your Fabric consumption in Capacity Units (CU), the underlying billing metric. Enter your estimated active users by session type to arrive at a total CU consumption. Use that total to size the Fabric SKU you need. Finally, pick your region and currency below to estimate what it costs.
| Session type | Active Users | CU/second | CU-hours (730 hrs) |
|---|---|---|---|
Planner | 1.16 CU | 846.8 CU-hrs | |
Stakeholder | 0.23 CU | 167.9 CU-hrs | |
Viewer | 0.05 CU | 36.5 CU-hrs | |
| Subtotal | 3 | 1.44 CU | 1,051.2 CU-hrs |
| Add: % for other Fabric resources 2 | 1.87 CU | 1,366.6 CU-hrs |
- Microsoft meters Fabric Plan in sessions. A session starts when a user engages with a Plan item and runs for 30 days, whether or not the user returns.
- Consumption of Fabric SQL, OneLake, Power BI XMLA API and other native Fabric items are additional CU meters. Budget an additional 30% of estimated CU towards this, as indicated above. Actual consumption will vary based on data volume, query patterns and active usage.
- Automation jobs (optional) for advanced use cases like connected planning and automated cascading updates are metered separately and not included above. Each completed job consumes a fixed 2 CU-hours of capacity, whatever its runtime.
- CU rates are set by Microsoft and apply uniformly across regions. Dollar cost of each CU varies by region. See the latest Fabric billing and metering documentation.
Capacity and Sessions
The estimator above sizes a capacity from your active user counts. This section shows how much capacity each session consumes, and how many sessions a given capacity holds. A session, once started, reserves its share for 30 days.
Sessions come in three types: Planner, Stakeholder and Viewer. Fabric meters them in timepoints, a unit lasting 30 seconds. An F2 makes 2 × 30 = 60 CU-seconds available per timepoint, an F64 makes 64 × 30 = 1,920 CU-seconds per timepoint. When a user engages with a Plan item, a session starts and draws its rate from every timepoint for the next 30 days, whether or not the user is active.
| Rate | In CU-seconds | In CU-hours | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Session type | CU/second the session’s rate | Per timepoint rate × 30 | Per hour rate × 3,600 | Per month (730 hrs) per hour × 730 | CU-hours (730 hrs) per month ÷ 3,600 |
Planner | 1.16 | 34.8 | 4,176 | 3,048,480 | 846.8 |
Stakeholder | 0.23 | 6.9 | 828 | 604,440 | 167.9 |
Viewer | 0.05 | 1.5 | 180 | 131,400 | 36.5 |
CU-seconds is the unit the Fabric Capacity Metrics app reports. CU-hours is the same quantity divided by 3,600, and it is the unit Microsoft publishes session and automation figures in. Both measure capacity consumed, not time elapsed, the way a kilowatt-hour measures energy rather than an hour.
What matters for sizing is how many sessions you have, not how active they are. One Planner session on an F2 reserves 58 percent of that capacity, leaving 42 percent for every other Fabric and Power BI workload. The same session on an F16 reserves 7.25 percent.
| Fabric capacity | Available per timepoint CU-seconds | One Planner 34.8 CU-seconds per timepoint | One Stakeholder 6.9 CU-seconds per timepoint | One Viewer 1.5 CU-seconds per timepoint |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F2 | 60 | 58% | 11.5% | 2.5% |
| F4 | 120 | 29% | 5.75% | 1.25% |
| F8 | 240 | 14.5% | 2.88% | 0.63% |
| F16 | 480 | 7.25% | 1.44% | 0.31% |
| F32 | 960 | 3.63% | 0.72% | 0.16% |
| F64 | 1,920 | 1.81% | 0.36% | 0.08% |
| F128 | 3,840 | 0.91% | 0.18% | 0.04% |
| F256 | 7,680 | 0.45% | 0.09% | 0.02% |
| F512 | 15,360 | 0.23% | 0.04% | 0.01% |
| F1024 | 30,720 | 0.11% | 0.02% | <0.01% |
| F2048 | 61,440 | 0.06% | 0.01% | <0.01% |
Each percentage is the session’s CU-seconds per timepoint divided by the capacity’s: a Planner’s 34.8 against an F2’s 60 is 58 percent.
- Based on an approximate 1:5:20 mix of Planners, Stakeholders and Viewers, with all users active concurrently. Where that exact ratio would exceed a capacity, the mix is trimmed to fit, most noticeably on F2, F4 and F8.
- A 30% CU allowance is reserved for other Fabric resources. Actual capacity required will vary by user activity and workload mix.
- Automation jobs are additional and not included above. Each completed job consumes 2 CU-hours, so 12 jobs a day is 24 CU-hours, the equivalent of 1 CU held for the whole day.
- The estimates above assume all listed users have active concurrent sessions. If not all users trigger a session in a given month, actual CU consumption will be lower, meaning you may be able to (a) support more users within the same capacity, (b) redirect unused capacity towards other Fabric workloads or (c) consider a lower capacity SKU.
Best Practices
Size the capacity for Plan sessions, with room for automation jobs and other Fabric resources. That headroom keeps it responsive.
Enterprise agreements with negotiated pricing may carry additional reservation discounts.
Did You Know
Common Questions About Sessions and Capacity
About this page
Lumel is a strategic ISV of Microsoft and the development partner behind Microsoft Fabric Plan.
This page is an overview of Microsoft's Fabric Plan capability. It should not be relied upon for decision-making without verifying with Microsoft and is subject to your license agreement or any other agreement with Microsoft. Microsoft's strategy and possible future developments for Fabric Plan are subject to change by Microsoft at any time for any reason without notice.
This document is provided without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Lumel assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in this document, except in cases of intentional misconduct or gross negligence by Lumel.
Microsoft and Microsoft Fabric are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
