A Complete Guide to Power Platform Pricing

Power Platform is a great platform to automate a business process within the organization, it offers a plethora of features that can be leveraged to minimize the development cycle. Power Platform software is extended from Azure features and services. For Eg: Dataverse manages to store data with the help of Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Blob Storage; AI Builder is built on top of Azure OCR and Form Recognizer.

With great features, it comes with an expensive pricing model but still, a basic app can be built and used with standard connectors. Basic power platform software is available with the seeded license, If an app is created with a premium connector the user should also be mapped with a premium license. Types of power platform licenses are:

• Seeded – It a license model where some of the basic Power Platform stuffs will be attached with the other licences. For Eg: Office 365 license will have Power Apps and Power Automate access with free connectors.
• Per App and Per User

If Dataverse (Premium Connector) is one of the premium connectors which is used for storing data it requires a per-app plan or per user plan for the end-users to access the full capabilities of the app. By default “Power Apps for Office 365” plan is added for everyone.

• Licensing – Per app or per user license plan should be added for end users to access premium connectors or a Power Apps license included in select Dynamics 365 plans.

• Per App Plan – It charges 10$ per user and allows individual users to run two applications and one portal for a specific business scenario in a specific environment. Sharing an app with a user consumes the per app capacity.

• Per User Plan– It charges 40$ per user and allows a user to run unlimited applications based on the full capabilities.

Microsoft updated its pricing plan, Which will be effective from October 2021

SharePoint is part of the basic Office 365 plan and it can be used to store data, “Power Apps for Office 365” is enough to access the datasource.

• Since SharePoint is a standard connector it can be used as an alternative for Dataverse to eliminate the price factor. Using the out of the box permission levels we can secure the data from the item level.

Power Portal

For External users, a separate power portal has to be created to access the screens and the data can be stored in the dataverse. For creating a portal a separate license has to be bought in order to use the portal features. Two types of licenses are available.

• Login Capacity – It authenticates the user and limitations were based on login capacity

• It starts at 200$ per month for a business unit.
  • The login is for unique logins per contact per day.  If the same user logs in 20 times in the same day, it still only counts as one login.

• Page view Capacity – It allows anonymous users

• It starts at 100$ for 100000 page views, It does not authenticate users.

Internal users can access the portal with per app or per user plans. So their usage doesn’t incur additional costs.

AI Builder

AI Builder is one of the required software for a business, Microsoft offers a wide range of features from Object Detection, Invoice Processing, Form Processing etc.,

Based on the usage, units should be purchased, For a minimum of 1 unit, $500 is charged. For Eg:

If Form Processing is purchased for 2000 pages, 2 Units will be allocated and $1000 is charged,

In addition to that If Receipt processing is purchased for 10000 receipts per month, 3 Units will be allocated and $1500 is charged

AI Builder addon pricing does not include Power Apps and Power Automate plan.

Power Virtual Agents

Nowadays every website has a ChatBot to guide their user to navigate to the correct service and makes users engaging while they use the app.

Microsoft charges based on the number of sessions, For 2000 sessions, $1000 is charged per month, a top-up option is also available for extra 1000 sessions, $450 is charged.

Power BI

Power BI follows the Pro and Premium model, while Pro is available with Microsoft 365 E5 license with features like self-service analytics to visualize data with live dashboards and reports.

Premium has Per User and Per Capacity model, Per User – along with the pro features if offers advanced AI, unlock self-service data prep for big data, and simplify data management and access at enterprise scale

Per Capacity – All features(Per User model) will be available for the whole organization.

All pricing model mentioned above is subject to change in the future, So check out the latest price details in the below links.

Power Apps, Power Automate, AI Builder, Virtual Agents, Power BI

Even though it offers great readymade software which is highly customizable, but cost part does not seem to be eye candy for the business.
Some of the software can be replaced with Azure services with some little work since it is the base for Power Platform and it offers a pay-as-you-use model, We can see those services in later posts.

Leave your questions in the comments, Happy Building 🙂