A simple guide to Power Platform Licensing (PowerApps and Power Automate)

A quick read so you don't have to shift through all the jargon(updated monthly)

This particular topic is so simple that most of us don't even think about it. Yet it is so complicated that most of us don't want to think about it.

This guide is meant to cover your basic needs as admin/devs to understand the cost of your solutions and maybe explain to your stakeholders on the perceived cost of your solutions.

1. Powerapps:

   You have 4 types of licences.

   1. Free (You can only use SharePoint Online and Excel Online on this, need to assign attached licence to your Microsoft 365 subscription. You can only build canvas apps, not model driven.

      

      However the default environment will still allow you to build model driven apps, but not use them in play mode.

   2. Per Apps (USD 5 per user per month)

      Good for single application only: Self explanatory, users with this licence can access only one premium app with this licence, needs to be applied at an environment level and cannot be bought online directly so you'll need to buy it from admin centre.

      See attached link to see if this is suitable for your org as deploying it at scale is a bit manual and you need to buy it in volume.

      

   3. Per User( Premium) (USD 20 per user per month): All you can eat. You buy this licence and the user can access unlimited apps. If you use licence auto claim, life becomes even easier. But costs do add up!

   4. Power Apps PAYG (USD 10 per user per month): Complex to implement. Haven't seen this used yet but handy to know this exists. Similar to per app but this you can turn off after a month if you want

   Tips:

   🚀You can negotiate with Microsoft or your vendor and get volume discounts as well

   🚀 Premium is the best one to scale as it comes with extra dataverse storage per licence. All paid licences have some dataverse capacity, but it's at Microsoft's mercy so I won't count on this.

   🚀 You can use developer environments for users of you want to trial out dataverse capabilities without purchasing licences.

   🚀You can use the CoE kit or the audit logs to see who is using your apps and remove licence to free up costs!!

2. Power Automate:

   If you purchase the powerapps licences with powerapps premium, you get away with not having a power automate licence due to entitlements you get.E.g. if you associate a premium app with a power automate flow, you get away with not having a standalone licence. However, if you are running stand-alone processes like:

   a. Fetching data from a SQL server at 12 am and syncing the data to a dataverse table

   b. Triggering notification emails to users at 8 am for certain reminders

   then you need a premium licence (USD 15 per month).

   Due to lack of experience and hence understanding of RPA, I won't talk about Power Automate Desktop, which in my opinion should have been called something else as it is completely different.

3. Power Pages: This is one of the simplest ones. It categorises users into 2 groups; authenticated and unauthenticated.

   Authenticated is expensive (USD 2 per user per month) whereas anonymous is cheap (USD 0.15 per user per month).

   

   If your users have premium powerapps licence, you don't have to pay for user authenticated logins.

4. Power Virtual Agents (next article to follow soon)