Power Platform | Licensing revisited II

After publishing my first review article last week in terms of Power Platform licensing, I was awaiting commenting and feedback. Many of you have asked, if I could continue the series and talk about additional options. And as I outlined, there´s no single licensing for Power Platform as a suite, and products included inside this family are following their individual licensing – Today, I am going to cover the start from an automation side of the house. We are going to take a closer look at Power Automate licensing options today.

First, let me start again, by outlining the individual cost segments, as those are typical falling short, when it comes to licensing consideration as I outlined in my previous article. As designing and using either cloud- or desktop flowsm, we could expect them to interact via Connectors Framework with APIs. I therefore recommend paying attention to the amount of API Requests entitled for in each individual license option.

But of course API calls are not the only cost segment of interest. AI Builder credits included in options could become important as well. Specifically, when looking for automation jobs like:

• Object Character Recognition (OCR)
• Predictions
• Sentiment Analysis
• Using one of the prebuilt AI models
• Using a custom trained AI model

And if you do plan to use the Approvals application, which is using Power Automate flows, you should also familiarize yourself with the Dataverse capacity entitlement coming with each license options. As the amount of approvals would grow, the amount of database capacity comes to interest. And if using approvals with e-Signature on attachments, the file capacity should be taken care of as well.

As there currently is no PAYGO option inside Power Automate licensing, the above visual is focused around the user-based options and departmental/scenario-based options which are looking more like stairways as per each scenario the usage might grow and therefore the stairways are showing up.

As there is an up-front usage modeling with user-based licensing, it makes a lot of sense, to consider mix and match in between the licensing options for an enterprise organization. And with the amount of tasks that could be automated by unattended bots, both RPA options should be seen as „in the mix“ with other options in a typical cost center approach.

What helps designing the best mix & match approach is taking a look in above shared matrix. As you can quickly recognize, compared to previous matrix shown from Power Apps perspective, there´s a lot more options a company could consider. That also might be a good reason of using Process Advisor to get familiar with possible automation projects inside your company.

Allowing for a better reading option, again I put all the references on an addtional visual for you. And as things might change, I always encourage to download the latest licensing guide for Power Platform.

Based on customer conversations dealing in both the rapid application low-code development- and the hyper-automation world, there´s one question left open on mix & match:

What about using the Power Automate included capabilities in Power Apps license options?

Procurement Member

As those include flows running in context of an app and doesn´t include any kind of robotic process automation, though those flows could be triggered via a primary flow from within an app, I would highly recommend to consider what kind of flows should be running in context of an app. Building an app, to kick-off flows and avoiding individual Flow licensing is like rebuilding a CRM system based on SharePoint. Technically, it may work, but if users accept the shortfalls – to be discussed.

I hope this article again is offering some transparency on the triage ongoing during license design and negotiation. If you do have any comments or questions, please let me know. Until then, …