Announcing the preview of pay-as-you-go for Power Automate
We are excited to announce a new flexible way for you to pay for Microsoft Power Automate. Currently, admins must predict licensing needs in advance, then purchase licenses, and assign them to makers for them to start using premium features of Power Automate. While this works for situations where admins understand their licensing needs in advance, we’ve heard from customers that there are many scenarios where they don’t yet know their needs, or where they need to scale up or down usage over time. To address these scenarios, we are introducing pay-as-you-go for Power Automate, where you only pay for what you use, giving you more flexibility to get started with Power Automate with low risk and then scale your investments over time based on your usage patterns.
Test the waters
When building an enterprise flow that is shared with a large set of users in your organization, it is often tough to predict how many users will want to use it, making it hard to forecast your licensing needs in advance. Now you can start with the pay-as-you-go option to gauge usage patterns then determine whether purchasing a pre-paid Power Automate subscription plan makes sense.
Share costs across your organization
Many organizations want to allocate software license costs to the department or team that used the licenses. Pay-as-you-go makes this possible by letting teams pay for flow runs using Microsoft Azure subscriptions linked to their own departmental budgets, and by providing the option to use Azure Cost Management and Azure tags to visualize and divide up costs.
Setting up the Power Automate pay-as-you-go plan enables users to build and run premium Power Automate flows and to pay for their usage using Azure subscription based on the number of times these flows run. This contrasts with the existing Power Automate per user subscription plans which requires licenses to be purchased and allocated to a user in advance of running flows.
A flow can either run in the cloud, on a desktop with a user (attended), or on a desktop without user interaction (unattended).
Users and flows with standalone licenses will not incur charges for running flows. This means that you can simultaneously leverage the per user plan to license some users of your flows in a pay-as-you-go environment while also using the Power Automate pay-as-you-go meter to cover for seasonal or occasional usage. You can review usage reporting for Power Automate pay-as-you-go meters in the downloadable pay-as-you-go consumption report from the Microsoft Power Platform admin center and use the information in that report to determine whether standalone licenses might make sense for any users or flows. For more details about how flow run charges work please review our pay-as-you-go meters documentation.
To make it easy to test and fix your flows, no charges will be incurred if you’re testing your flow in the designer or resubmitting failed runs. Additionally, if you use the “Child flow” feature for cloud flows or attended flows, there will only be a single charge for the parent flow run, no charges will be incurred for child flow runs. For unattended flows, both parent and child flow runs will be charged.
We are also thrilled to announce the Power Automate Embed pay-as-you-go approach for ISVs that can now integrate Power Automate’s low code capabilities into their existing solutions without having to ask the customer to transact the Power Automate licenses separately with Microsoft. The customer’s Power Automate consumption that is part of the ISV’s core offering can now be charged directly to ISVs Azure subscription. Details, including a form on interest in preview, can be found on the ISV Cloud Embed page and in the following blog, Power Automate pay-as-you-go for ISVs.
In addition to Power Automate, other services like Power Apps and Dataverse are available in a pay-as-you-go model, offering flexible licensing across Microsoft Power Platform.
If your organization already has one or more Microsoft Power Platform pay-as-you-go environments configured, Power Automate pay-as-you-go will be enabled for all those environments and any Power Automate usage in those environments that qualifies based on our pay-as-you-go meters documentation, will result in charges to your Azure subscription.
Please give it a try and share your thoughts. If you have any questions, please visit: Power Automate community forum
