I guess it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish.
The desktop version is free, no strings attached. However the value comes from publishing to the web service for sharing etc. That's not free. It can be cheap, but when you have a lot of users the "premium capacity" can be quite expensive.
PowerBI is not free to use, its part of Office 365 (Microsoft 365 or whatever it is called today). I remember 2 companies ago (in 2019) some data scientists had to get a license for it approved.
For personal analytics the desktop version is free. The web service has different pricing tiers (which can be very expensive)
Edit...just to add to this. I personally pay for it and it's $5/mth. Premium capacity can be a lot more...but if the Data Scientist needed a license, it may have only been $5/mth, paltry compared to a data scientist salary.
It was a non-profit, every single EUR had to be accounted for. On the good side, they did get heavy discounts on some licenses, including from Microsoft Windows/Office. Except IT manager didn't know (even though he was a Microsoft fanboy), he only figured that out after paying full price for years...
Thankfully my memory is cloudy :-) maybe two points:
1. In general the idea of a separate reporting DB maintained by separate people who might not understand the semantics of schema changes seems inefficient in a world of cheap compute, compared to an application exposing key metrics directly. Upgrading every two weeks with an ETL pipeline off an app can result in RTL breaking every two weeks. Better just to release metrics from the same team that makes any other changes.
2. I think connecting hosted PowerBI to a IP-whitelisted Azure blob store is not possible, and that just seemed silly.
