How to turn off automatic upgrade of Power BI licenses

Go to https://app.powerbi.com/. Using the gear icon go to Admin Portal and make sure Tenant settings is selected.

Here, there are 2 options you can use, depending on your organization’s needs.

  1. To prevent auto-assignment from happening again you need to disable the “Allow users to try Power BI paid features” option.

Of course, if there is a need, this can be enabled only for specific security groups or enabled for entire organization except specific security groups.

What this will do is, once the end user tries to access a Pro Workspace (for example), they will not be able to access the Workspace and will see below message instead.

As you can see, the user still has the option to go online and buy a license if @he wants to, although this may not be what most organizations want. Here is where the next (2nd) option below comes handy.

To go even further and prevent end users from buying Power BI licenses on their own, you can direct them to a specific internal “software request” page where they can actually request this license or follow your internal Software Asset Management process.

Also from Admin portalTenant settings, under “Publish “Get Help” information” – “Licensing requests”, you can paste the URL to your internal software request page or any other page where you have some information on how someone can request Power BI licenses.

What this will do is, once the end user tries to access a Pro Workspace, they will not be able to access it and will see the message below instead.

Clicking on Upgrade account, that Bing page (in my example) will open. Imagine that this can be an internal page for requesting software, licenses or just FAQ documentation page, as per your organization’s needs.