Most Power BI consultancies will not tell you what support costs until you ask. The ones that do publish a number tend to publish only one, which makes it impossible to work out what you are actually comparing.
So here are all the published UK numbers I could find in one table, mine included, and what the gaps between them are really made of.
What UK Power BI support actually costs
Every figure here comes from a published page, not a guess. Where a supplier says "from", that is their word.
| Provider | Entry | Middle | Top |
|---|---|---|---|
| This site | £250/mo Watch | £750/mo Care | £1,500/mo Partner |
| Hammad Syed (independent) | £450/mo | — | £1,500/mo |
| Telefónica Tech, formerly Adatis (G-Cloud) | £1,750/mo Essential | £3,250/mo Established | £8,250/mo Enterprise |
| Typical agency managed service | £3,000/mo | — | £10,000/mo |
The spread from top to bottom is thirty three times. Nobody is doing thirty three times the work.
What actually separates them is three things: whether a named person or a ticket queue answers you, whether the price includes build hours or only responses, and how much account management, delivery management and margin is stacked on top. Telefónica Tech's Essential plan includes an assigned Service Delivery Manager and an SME Support Engineer. Two salaried roles on your account is a real cost and a real benefit, and it is most of why the number starts where it does.
What each band buys
£250 to £500 a month. Monitoring and diagnosis, no build hours. Somebody notices your refresh failed before your finance director does, tells you why, and the fixing is a separate conversation. This band only makes sense if what keeps you awake is not knowing something has broken.
£750 to £1,500 a month. Monitoring plus hands on the keyboard. A small allowance of build work, a response commitment, and usually some form of periodic review. This is where most SMEs actually sit, because the thing they need is not a lot of work, it is somebody who will do the small amount of work quickly.
£1,750 to £3,250 a month. Managed service proper. Named delivery manager, tighter response commitments, proactive monitoring rather than reactive. Telefónica Tech quote email and ticket response of up to 15 minutes at this level, with phone support nine to five, Monday to Friday.
£8,250 a month and up. Critical platform support, scaling to 24/7. If your Power BI estate genuinely cannot be down overnight, this is the honest price of that. Most estates can be down overnight.
The number that is not on the price list
Nearly every retainer on the market is sold as an allowance of hours. Ten hours a month, twenty hours a month, and hours that do not roll over.
Hours are easy to price and easy to sell. What they do not tell you is how long you will wait, because an hour of somebody's time says nothing about when that hour happens. A supplier with sixty clients on ten hours each has six hundred hours of committed work and a queue, and your ten hours can sit at the back of it.
The alternative is to sell capacity as concurrency: how many of your requests can be in flight at once, rather than how many hours you have banked. That is how mine are structured. Watch has no build hours at all. Care takes one request at a time with no cap on how many you make across the month. Partner takes two at once and has ten hours behind it. Hours never roll over on any tier, which is deliberate, because rolled-over hours are how a support contract quietly becomes a project budget nobody scoped.
"Unlimited support"
Where you see it, read the fair use terms rather than the headline.
Unlimited means one of two things. Either there is a queue and you are in it, or "support" is defined narrowly enough to exclude the thing you were going to ask about. Neither is dishonest. Both are worth knowing before you sign.
The three numbers that tell you what you are buying: how fast they commit to responding, how much build work is included, and how many of your requests can be open at the same time. A page that gives you all three is being straight with you. A page that gives you none of them is selling you the feeling of cover.
What I charge, and what is in it
Three tiers, rolling monthly, cancel any time, and answered by me rather than a ticket queue.
| Watch | Care | Partner | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £250/mo | £750/mo | £1,500/mo |
| Refresh monitoring and alerting | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Scored monthly health report | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Failure diagnosed within | 24 hours | 24 hours | 24 hours |
| Fixes returned within | not included | 48 hours | 48 hours |
| Build work included | none | up to 4 hours | up to 10 hours |
| Requests in flight at once | — | 1 | 2 |
| Model review | — | quarterly | monthly working session |
| Reporting roadmap ownership | — | — | Yes |
Watch deliberately has no build hours. It is monitoring and a scored report tracked over time, so you can see whether your estate is getting better or worse rather than only hearing about it when something breaks.
It is £250 rather than the £450 the market starts at because it contains no build work. Pricing it as monitoring only, and saying so, is cheaper to deliver and easier to leave than a tier that quietly assumes you will need fixing every month.
Which one do you actually need
Three questions, and they are not really about budget.
Does anything break that you find out about from a user rather than from a system? That is a monitoring problem, and it is the cheapest one to solve.
When something breaks, is the problem that nobody can fix it, or that nobody can fix it quickly? If it is the second, you need a response commitment, not more hours.
Is there a roadmap nobody owns? If your reporting has stopped moving forward and everyone is too busy to say why, that is not a support contract, that is the Partner conversation, and it is worth having honestly before you buy the cheaper thing and find it does not help.
Common questions
How much does Power BI support cost per month in the UK?
Published UK retainers run from £250 a month at the monitoring-only end to £8,250 a month for a critical-platform managed service. Independent consultants tend to sit between £450 and £1,500, and agency managed services between £3,000 and £10,000. The variable is not the amount of work, it is whether build hours are included and how much delivery management sits on top.
What is the cheapest Power BI support retainer in the UK?
The lowest published price I have found is £250 a month, which is my Watch tier: refresh monitoring, alerting, a scored monthly health report, and any failure diagnosed within 24 hours, with no build hours included. The next lowest published figure I could find is £450 a month.
What is the difference between Power BI support and a managed service?
Broadly, scale and staffing. A support retainer is usually one person who knows your estate and answers when it breaks. A managed service adds an assigned service delivery manager, proactive monitoring, tighter response commitments and often out-of-hours cover, which is why the entry price is closer to £1,750 a month.
Should a Power BI retainer be priced in hours?
Hours are easy to price but they say nothing about when the work happens. Ten hours a month is worth very little if you are sixtieth in a queue. Capacity sold as concurrent requests, meaning how many of your issues can be open at once, describes what you will actually experience. Ask either way, but ask.
Do unused retainer hours roll over?
On mine, no, and I would treat rollover as a warning rather than a perk. Banked hours turn a support agreement into an unscoped project budget, and the bank always gets spent in the month you can least afford the disruption.
What response time should I expect from Power BI support?
At the enterprise end, published commitments go as tight as 15 minutes for email and ticket response, with phone cover nine to five, Monday to Friday. At the SME end, 24 hours to diagnose and 48 hours to return a fix is a realistic commitment, and any supplier who will put those two numbers in writing is telling you something useful.
Can I cancel a Power BI support retainer?
Mine are rolling monthly, cancel any time. Longer minimum terms are common further up the market, so check the notice period before you compare monthly prices, because a twelve month lock at £1,750 is a different product to a rolling month at the same price.
Every price is published on the services page, and the FAQ covers the awkward ones. All figures exclude VAT where applicable. If you want to work out which of the three you actually need, that is what the free twenty minute intro call is for, and I will tell you if the honest answer is none of them yet.
Competitor figures from published pages, checked 26 August 2026: Telefónica Tech UK Data & AI, Power BI as a Service Support (G-Cloud) and Hammad Syed. Last updated 26 August 2026.