Power Platform | Path to consumption-based licensing?

With the recent blog announcement of the Power Platform group regarding the upcoming pricing and licensing changes for Power Apps there was quite some noise ongoing. Positive, in terms of the price-cut and clarification introduced for the per App plans. Negative, in terms of discussing if the price cut on per App is 50% or not due to new entitlements and still being too far away for a business justification. These are only a few examples of the ongoing discussions. As this topic isn´t a new one and I´ve run through this in a lot of conversations, today I thought of sharing a story with you in terms of a path to consumption-based licensing.

What I heard many of us saying before the price cut and the new entitlements was – the Power Apps per App licensing is a better way for us to

• budget planning
• scale-out and adoption
• license management
• business justification

Let´s dive into this, as we now know that the upcoming entitlements for per App plan licensing will be 1 app only. That simplifies the Power Apps per App plans and brings us down to my example, where I map this license with a One-day Ticket for a London travelcard. The Power Apps per User plan license is mapped to the Monthly travelcard. In above visual you do find the pricing for both, or you could visit London Travelcards – 1-day, Weekly, Monthly Pass Prices 2021 (city-guide.london) for cross-references. For the simplification of comparison, I selected Zones 1-9 at anytime.

Being a frequent traveler to London, I love to use public transport services. And as you can see from the visual above, as the passes allow for using multiple services, it can be easily compared to Power Apps licensing, where I am using either canvas, model-driven, portals or even flows running in context of an app as „services“. But not only due to pandemic, there is a question circling around on business justification of the monthly paid travel card or should I say per User licensing?

Wouldn´t it be better to switch to a consumption-based payment and gain higher business value?

Low-code Consultant

Of course, if I would be able to tell the amount of days I am about to travel in London and need a One-day travelcard only, the math is an easy one (same as with the Power Apps per App plan licenses). Less than 15-days of traveling in a month, the One-day option is cheaper, agreed?

Breaking down the monthly travelcard to daily payment (as you can see from the diagram in the visual above), there´s a pattern in it. It shows that on an average of 30-days, I am paying less than a One-day card. But I need to travel at least 15-days in a month in total to get the ROI of a monthly travelcard.

You may ask, where does this map with Power Apps licensing and the price-cut or the new entitlements? Well, same as before your business justification starts, when you consider each individual options benefit. Consider, same as I can travel only one-day with the One-day travelcard, I can only run one single App with a per App plan license. Next, comparing this with a monthly card I can travel anytime during a month which maps to our Power Apps per User licensing where I do have use-rights for unlimited apps.

So, is it the simple math then of saying – whenever you cross 4 apps to be used by a single user you should consider the per User plan to be cheaper? In fact not, it´s even earlier. And this is due to the additional entitlements that comes with each type of the license. API calls, storage capacity to name two of them.

Running a true business value assessment takes into account both of the licensing options including those entitlements that are covered by the Microsoft 365 licenses. It´s worth enterprise companies asking for assistance and including this part in an envisioning workshop.

Last but not least, let me deep dive into a true consumption-based licensing and why I think it would fail. Consider that we´re living in a world where more and more problems occur due to just thinking of our own benefits and less attraction of community health. What I mean by this? Well, just take into account the CO² debate who is going to pay for it and in which ratio. If everyone just pays for their own individual created CO² footprint, will there be enough return on invest to improve and solve today´s problems but also tomorrow´s?

If you would pay for running an app only (which would be a true consumption based model), would there be enough overhead to pay someone for improvements, leave room for fixing current issues and tomorrow´s challenges? I leave this an open question, looking forward to any comments or questions. Until then,…