The news
Microsoft Fabric Apps will be available to Power BI Pro and Premium Per User customers at no additional cost, Microsoft (MSFT) said on September 28, opening app building on governed company data, with AI coding agents, to many more Power BI users.
Arun Ulag, Microsoft's executive vice president of Azure Data, announced the change in a blog post for the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference in Barcelona. Apps in Power BI will enter preview in the coming weeks for Power BI Pro, Premium Per User and Microsoft Fabric capacity customers. Pro and Premium Per User customers will also get Fabric Apps and Fabric Database capabilities, with up to 1GB of storage per app, plus security and hosting.
Fabric Apps first launched in June 2026, and Microsoft said thousands of developers have since used them to build business applications and operational workflows. Apps are built with Rayfin, an open-source software development kit (SDK) and command-line tool. Developers, or the AI coding agents working for them, write the app backend and deploy it to Fabric. Microsoft listed GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code, OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code among the supported tools.
Microsoft said apps can connect directly to Fabric warehouses, SQL databases, lakehouses and Power BI semantic models, the shared business definitions behind reports, without copying data and while keeping existing permissions. New features include TypeScript backend functions, a Secret Store for credentials, PostgreSQL support, private-by-default access and built-in usage metrics.
The audience is much larger than Fabric's current base. Microsoft said Fabric supports more than 40,000 customers, while Power BI has more than 425,000. In an interview with The Register, Ulag said Power BI usage exceeds 35 million business users every month.
Microsoft also said Fabric IQ, which feeds governed Power BI semantic models into Copilot Chat and Cowork, is now generally available there, and it began a preview of a two-way integration with Salesforce Data Cloud 360.
The numbers
- Database storage included per app
- Up to 1GB
- Microsoft Fabric customers
- More than 40,000
- Power BI customers
- More than 425,000
- Monthly Power BI business users (per Ulag)
- More than 35 million
- Additional cost for Pro and PPU customers
- None, per Microsoft
Why CEOs should care
For chief data officers and CIOs, the pool of people who can ship an application on company data is about to grow sharply. Apps that write data back and run workflows are a step beyond dashboards. Before the preview lands, decide who may publish apps, who reviews them, who owns them when the builder moves on, and how they are retired. Microsoft says apps keep existing permissions and are private by default, but an inventory and approval process is still the organization's job.
For CISOs, the new element is AI-generated code touching governed data. Ask whether apps built by coding agents go through the same code review and testing as other software, how secrets are stored and rotated, and how app activity is logged. Microsoft's Secret Store and usage metrics help, but they do not replace a security review.
For CFOs and procurement teams, "no additional cost" covers Fabric Apps and up to 1GB of database per app for Pro and Premium Per User customers. The sources we reviewed do not say what happens when an app outgrows that limit or how heavy use is billed, so ask your Microsoft account team before popular apps scale. Vendors of low-code and internal-tool builders should expect a competitor bundled into licences many companies already pay for.
The bigger picture
Microsoft is positioning Fabric as the data layer for its Copilot assistants and AI agents. Making Fabric IQ generally available in Copilot Chat and Cowork, and previewing a Salesforce Data Cloud 360 integration, points the same way: keep company data and its business definitions in Fabric, then let people and agents act on it. The Register described the Power BI move as widening the audience for agent-built data apps by an order of magnitude.
The numbers suggest a funnel. With roughly ten times as many Power BI customers as Fabric customers, giving Pro users a taste of Fabric Apps is a way to draw more of that base onto the wider platform, which is our reading rather than a stated Microsoft goal.
What’s next
The preview is due in the coming weeks. Watch for the admin controls Microsoft ships with it, published limits and pricing beyond the included 1GB per app, and a general availability date. Early customer examples will show whether analysts actually build production apps or mostly prototypes.
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