Built with purposeAsk three consultants what a Power BI report costs and you will get three different numbers, often for what sounds like the same project. That is not because anyone is guessing. It is because the number that matters is not "a report." It is the specific shape of your data, and that shape is invisible from the outside.
The four things that actually drive price
Every quote, ours included, is really pricing four separate things.
How many sources feed the model. One clean export is a different job from stitching together a POS, a payroll system and a bank feed that all format dates differently. Each source is a connection to build, test and keep working after the first refresh.
What state the data is in. This is the single biggest driver, and the one people underestimate most. A clean, consistent export goes straight into a model. A folder of manually edited spreadsheets with renamed columns and merged cells needs real cleanup work before anything can be built on top of it.
How many pages, and how much logic, the report needs. A single scorecard is not the same build as a report with role-based views, drill-through pages and a dozen calculated measures.
How many legal entities need to line up. Consolidating two or more companies into one picture means currency handling, intercompany elimination and a mapping layer that a single-entity report never needs.
Why "just give me a number" does not work
A quote that ignores these four things is either padded to cover the worst case, or it is going to miss and turn into a difficult conversation halfway through the build. Neither is good for you.
That is why our first conversation asks about sources, users, refresh needs and the decision the report must support. An estimate should come from the real scope and a representative sample, with assumptions written down before work starts.
What is not in the number
Two things are consistently, and deliberately, priced separately.
Power BI licences are billed separately under the client’s Microsoft arrangement. The required licence type and current price depend on how reports will be published and shared, so we confirm them during scoping.
Anything outside the agreed scope, an extra source discovered mid-project, a page nobody mentioned in scoping, gets quoted in writing before it is built. That is not a policy to protect margin. It is the only way a fixed-feeling estimate stays honest once real data shows up.
The fastest way to get a real number
Start with the business question and a short description of your systems. If a sample export would help, we agree what to share and how to strip sensitive information first. Talk through your reporting brief and we will define a sensible first step.