Power Platform Licensing

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One of everyone’s favourite Power Platform topics is that of licensing and more specifically… HOW DO I TRANSLATE THIS LICENSING GUIDE INTO HUMAN LANGUAGE?

To give Microsoft credit the licensing guide has improved massively over the last few years to the point where it’s actually a pretty good document now (compared to the 140 page version of a few years ago!) and explains the different license SKUs, what you get with the license (e.g. additional capacity or AI builder credits) so I’m not going to go into all that detail - The licensing guide is generally updated monthly. I tend to use this link as it always links to the most recent version - Licensing overview for Microsoft Power Platform - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn - In there you’ll also see the current pricing - although if your organisation has an enterprise agreement your negotiated price will likely be less.

One area that’s not so clear for people is understanding what Power App or Power Automate licenses are needed in which scenario how to apply it and which licenses are needed for their use case. This is especially when you can use a Power App license to cover your Power Automate needs, or when would you use a Power Automate Premium / Per User license vs a Process / Per Flow license?

My goal in this blog post is to help explain the licenses and how they may be applied. I’ll also show how we might consider applying these these against our ‘Scalable Governance Model’ that we’ve used as a foundation in previous posts. I’m not going to consider the administration of these in this post.

Let’s start by looking at the types of Power Apps licenses.

Firstly… It’s common that a solution doesn’t just consist of an App - There are often Flows as part of that solution too. Microsoft recognizes this and have given great flexibility by allowing use of Power Automate as part of that solution as part of the Power App license. The way it’s referred to is being ‘in the context of the App’ .

An example would be that you’re booking holiday using your Power App. You enter your dates and duration, and when you press your submit button it puts the data into your data source but also uses a Flow to fire off a message in Teams to your manager to either let them know or get their approval.

Power Platform Licensing - Power Apps - Application to different types of use cases

There are 3 key licenses (list prices shown are per month)

• Per App license (List price $5) - We can consider this as a 1:1 relationship. 1 license can be used for 1 app by 1 person. It fits well if there are people who are only going to use 1-3 apps consistently over a longer term.

• Pay As You Go (List price $10) - This is also a 1:1 relationship - One license can be used for 1 app by 1 active person… but for this one you don’t have to pre-allocate it to someone. You provide an Azure subscription and that license can be provided when someone needs it and lasts for a month. This is great if you don’t know the demand and how many licenses you need, or if it’s a process that’s used sporadically.

• Premium (Legacy:Per User) (List price $20) - This is a 1:N (Many) relationship. 1 person can create or use as many Apps as they like or are allowed to. It doesn’t matter if they use one all day every day, or every few months, or just once and never again… This is the ‘all you can eat model’ and gives the most flexibility for an organisation to maximise value from the platform.

Power Platform Licensing - Power Automate - Application to different types of use cases

There are 3 key licenses for Power Automate (which combine some previous SKUs which are also currently still available) (list prices shown are per month):

• Premium (Per User + attended RPA) (List Price $15 pppm) - We can consider this a 1:N (many) relationship. This is a combination of 2 legacy SKUs - with this license 1 person can create or use as many Flows as they like or are allowed to (Per User) and run attended Power Automate Desktop (PAD) RPAs.

• Process (Evolution from Per Flow & RPA unattended license) ($150 pfpm) - We can consider this a Null : 1 relationship as there is no human involved. Flows run more like a service without input from an individual (hence Null). In the same mindset they can run PAD RPAs unattended hosted on their their organisation infrastructure.

• Hosted Process (MSFT hosted version of Process) ($215 pfpm) - This is the same functionality as the Process license but hosted on Microsoft Infrastructure.

We can arrange these pictures to demonstrate the scale of use cases they commonly align to. Individual scale, Team use, or Enterprise scale.

Power Platform Licensing - Alignment to different scales of use cases

We can take this alignment a step further and consider how it aligns to our scalable governance model.

This alignment is dependent on the maturity of the organisation and their scale of premium licensing. As a start point we can consider an organisation with low to medium maturity / more limited premium licensing.

In this scenario the premium licenses would be focused on L / XL use cases (Reminder of the scalable model here)

With Power App licenses covering Flows in the context of the App - and as an org matures, or the availability of licenses increases, the use of these licenses can extend into M use cases

Flow licenses we see individual licenses primarily used for use cases clustered around L but extending into M and XL, and Process licenses covering L and XL and extending as maturity / licensing grows.

Power Platform licensing can be a complex beast but hopefully some of these drawings start to bring to life the simpler scenarios in which different licenses are needed or best used. I haven’t got into the world of Dynamics 365 licensing as it’s not a world I’ve explored (yet)

What’s your experience in use of Power Platform premium licensing?

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