Jukka Niiranen

Tag: Power Virtual Agent

  • Price points of Power Platform (2022 pricing and licenses)

    Price points of Power Platform (2022 pricing and licenses)

    NOTE: This post was originally published in March 2020, the last revision of pricing information is from November 2022.

    As of today, there isn’t a single place from where to check the actual prices of the different license types covered by the Microsoft Power Platform suite of products – like there is for Dynamics 365, for example. The information of prices vs. what paying that price actually entitles you to is distributed across several information sources and formats – starting from the individual product pages, to the learn.microsoft.com documentation pages, to the PDF licensing guides.

    To stop myself from having to always use a search engine to discover these pricing details, I decided to compile a list of links to the places where each individual Power Platform product team has made their pricing information public, as well as write out the current subscription prices in US Dollars and Euros. I’ve also included a few relevant licensing model elements that describe what the particular subscription entitles you to do (capacity, features and so on).

    Most of Power Platform product licensing is done via the prepaid subscription model familiar from Microsoft 365 (Office 365). More recently the pay-as-you-go (“PAYG”) option has been introduced for some of the services, allowing payment via an Azure subscription (read more about the November 2021 announcement here). It’s important to note that in general prepaid subscription prices are cheaper than pay-as-you-go. The PAYG option is primarily aimed as an option for customers to use, before they know the true consumption level and are ready to commit to a prepaid subscription. Where applicable, I’ve included the PAYG prices here for comparison.

    Your actual licensing costs will of course depend on the types of agreements your organization has with Microsoft. So, consider the prices on this page as mainly a starting point for understanding the relative costs of different Power Platform services.

    Power Apps / Pages

    Power Apps pricing

    Power Apps per app plan: $5 (€4.20)

    • Allows you to access one Power Apps app (canvas, model-driven, portal/website).
    • The same app in different Power Platform environments (dev/test/prod) requires a per app license for each environment.
    • Pay-as-you-go option: $10/monthly active user/app/month

    Power Apps per user plan: $20 (€16.90)

    • Allows you to access an unlimited number of Power Apps (canvas, model-driven, portal/website) in your tenant.
    • Can also be used for accessing canvas apps shared to guests in another tenant (not applicable to other app types).

    Power Apps pricing change on October 2021

    Before Oct 1st 2021, the Power Apps per app list price was $10 and Power Apps per user $40. See this blog post for more details on the price reduction as well as changes in the per app license entitlements. Note that your license agreement may still apply to the old terms, based on the contract duration.

    Power Pages (formerly Power Apps Portals)

    Power Pages pricing

    • Power Pages authenticated user capacity, 100 monthly active users: $200 (€168.70)(see also discount tiers).
      • Pay-as-you-go option: $4/user/site/month
    • Power Pages anonymous user capacity, 500 monthly active users: $75 (€63.20) (see also discount tiers).
      • Pay-as-you-go option: $0.30/user/site/month
    • Internal users (employees) can be licensed separately, via Power Apps or Dynamics 365 licenses, or as authenticated users.

    Licensing FAQ: Power Pages

    Power Apps portals (old licensing model, before Power Pages)

    Differences between Power Pages and Power Apps portals licensing model

    • Power Apps portals login capacity add-on, 100 logins per month: $200 (€168.79)(see also discount tiers).
    • Power Apps portals page view capacity add-on, 100,000 page views per month: $100 (€84.30).
    • Internal users must be licensed separately, either via Power Apps or Dynamics 365 licenses.

    Dataverse capacity (formerly “Common Data Service” / CDS)

    Power Apps and Power Automate licensing FAQ: Add-ons

    Storage
    • Dataverse Database Capacity (1GB) $40 (€33.70) per month
      • May still show up as “Common Data Service Database Capacity”
      • Pay-as-you-go option: $48 per GB used per month
    • Dataverse File Capacity (1GB) $2 (€1.69) per month
      • May still show up as “Common Data Service File Capacity”
      • Pay-as-you-go option: $2.40 per GB used per month
    • Dataverse Log Capacity (1GB) $10 (€8.40) per month
      • May still show up as “Common Data Service Log Capacity”
      • Pay-as-you-go option: $12 per GB used per month

    See also: What Dataverse capacity is included with the Power Apps and Power Automate plans?

    Power Platform / Dataverse API calls / API requests:
    • Power Platform Requests add-on: 10,000 daily API requests for $50 (€42.20) per month
      • Formerly known as “Power Apps and Power Automate capacity add-on”

    See also: Requests limits and allocations

    Power Automate (formerly “Microsoft Flow”)

    Power Automate Pricing

    Power Automate per user plan: $15 (€12.60)

    • Allows individual users to create unlimited flows, execution is limited based on available API requests per day (40,000 included)
    • Note: while Power Apps per app and per user plans includes similar rights, they are tied to the context of a canvas or model-driven app

    Power Automate per flow plan: $500 (€421.50) for five flows per month

    • Allows the organization to implement 5 flows, regardless of the number of users who trigger them
    • Child flows triggered by a parent flow do not need to be licensed
    • Execution is limited based on available API requests per day (250,000 included)
    • Additional flows can be purchased at $100 (€84.30)per flow per month
    • Pay-as-you-go option: $0.60 per each cloud flow run

    Power Automate per user plan with attended RPA: $40 (€33.70)

    • Allows individual users to run an attended RPA bot on their workstation
    • Presumably also contains similar rights as the standard Power Automate per user plan
    • Pay-as-you-go option: $0.60 per each attended desktop flow run

    Power Automate unattended RPA add-on: $150 (€126.50)

    • Allows the organization to run a single unattended RPA bot, no dependencies to users or workstations
    • Add-on requires either per user plan with attended RPA or per flow plan
    • Pay-as-you-go option: $3 per each unattended desktop flow run

    See also: Power Automate licensing FAQ.

    AI Builder

    Power Apps and Power Automate licensing FAQ: AI Builder

    AI Builder capacity add-on: $500 (€421,70) per unit per month

    • Each unit contains 1 million service credits on the tenant level
    • Allows the organization to use any of the AI model types included in AI Builder
    • AI models consume service credits when they are trained, used in an app or flow, or scheduled to periodically run. The amount of capacity consumed varies based the AI model, as well as the size and complexity of the data set. See AI Builder calculator to estimate the capacity requirement and cost of your model.
    • Add-on requires at least one paid Power Apps, Power Automate or Dynamics 365 license
    • For the built-in Business Card scanning feature in Dynamics 365 Sales, there is free capacity included in Sales Enterprise App licenses: 10 scans per user per month, pooled at tenant level. Sales Insights has a capacity limit for business card scanning of 200/user/month. If additional Business card scanning capacity is required, Sales Enterprise customers may purchase additional Sales Insights licenses. (Taken from Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide PDF document.)

    Power Virtual Agent

    Power Virtual Agents pricing

    Assign licenses and manage access to Power Virtual Agents

    Power Virtual Agent: $1,000 (€843.20) per 2,000 sessions per month

    • Allows the organization to have an unlimited number of bots
    • In addition to the tenant license, internal users will need to be assigned a user license. The tenant license costs money, but the user licenses that are purchased via the same mechanism are apparently free.
    • “A session is an interaction between the customer and the bot, and represents one unit of consumption. The session begins when an authored topic is triggered. These sessions are referred to as ‘billed sessions’ in the product. Sessions are deducted for both testing and production usage.”

    Power BI

    Power BI licensing in your organization

    Power BI Pro: $9.99 (€8.40) per user

    • Included in Office 365 E5 subscriptions for no additional charge
    • Each Pro license gets 10 GB of data storage capacity

    Power BI Premium per capacity: starting from $4,995 (€4,212,30) per organization

    • Offers dedicated compute and storage resources for your organization
    • No per-user license assignment needed for report consumption, report creation and sharing still requires Pro licenses for users
    • Required for advanced features, see comparison table
    • See What is Power BI Premium and Power BI Premium FAQ for more details

    Power BI Premium per user: $20 (€16.90)

    • New option to access premium features without organizational capacity purcahase requirement.

    Dive deeper into the licensing details

    Microsoft usually posts monthly updates to their licensing guide PDF documents. Here’s where you can grab the latest copies: Power Apps and Power Automate Licensing Guide & Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide.

  • First impressions on Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 1

    First impressions on Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 1

    It’s that time of the year again when all us Microsoft Business Applications geeks are blessed with two huge documents to consume: the Release Plans for both Power Platform and Dynamics 365. While I gotta say that it’s awesome to have this level of transparency on what specifically is in the next 6 month release cycle, the amount information does feel overwhelming – at least if you’re trying to cover more than a few specific products within the stack.

    Ultimately we should at least aim to have a general idea of how each piece of the BizApps puzzle is evolving. Especially the Power Platform side is very relevant for anyone who’s not strictly focused on training/delivering/administering just a single app from the Dynamics 365 portfolio, because this is your low-code toolkit for making those applications meet the real life needs of customers. Unlike with past CRM projects, the customization tools are not part of single server installation, rather they can be discovered from all around the Microsoft cloud.

    To make the Release Plan easier to digest, I’ve picked out the new/improved features that jumped out when I went through it for the first time. Instead of the PDF versions (which are coming a bit later anyway), I prefer the online documentation, so below are links to each of those items for you to drill deeper into – and also keep track of possible changes to the original plan.

    I’ve added my comments on why I consider these to be the most important items in the Release Plan. Time will tell how they actually land and what the impact will be. It’s going to be fun to review this list October 2020 when Wave 1 is over!

    Power Apps

    Single mobile app player for Canvas & Model: very much needed in order to break free from the assumption that Model-driven apps are only for Dynamics 365 customers.

    Offline improvements: the need for accessing data without a live connection is still very real in mobile scenarios. What is somewhat of a bummer is that the efforts here are targeting Model-driven apps only for now.

    Modern solution explorer makeover: Yes! There are a lot of areas where app maker productivity could be improved, so it’s great to see investments are being made here.

    Canvas app Monitor tool & Test studio GA: the wave of the future. Low-code app development isn’t going to be restricted to personal productivity scenarios, we’ll have much of the same needs as in the pro dev side.

    Azure Application Insights telemetry in Canvas: a great example of how the existing tools from Azure should be harnessed to offer shortcuts for Power Apps makers.

    Generate app from data with responsive layout for phone and tablet: it’s been an awkward limitation before to only support phone layouts. The bigger story is in bringing out these templates for how to actually make Canvas apps responsive, as it has been quite a mountain to climb for citizen developers. In 2020 Wave 1 we’ll also see a preview of the awaited responsive Canvas app pages.

    Canvas Components GA: very impactful stuff here. Component libraries, solution awareness, support for galleries and forms, using collections and media files. These are big steps in bringing the two app types of Canvas and Model-driven closer together.

    Power BI embed component in Portals: oh yeah, there’s that third app type, too… Definitely looks a lot more approachable than the current embed experience. As for Portals extensibility for pro devs, the CRUD Web API sure made Nick Doelman excited, so keep an eye on that one.

    Unified Interface enhancements: important for many Dynamics 365 experiences. Forms as modal dialogs in particular looks useful, better filters are about closing the gaps to legacy web client, search in this view is an age old requirement.

    Improved themes reflecting modern Microsoft Fluent themes: UI matters, the power of the Apps is not just in the logic, data and automation. MS should be more aggressive here when competing against other low-code development platforms.

    Power Automate

    Interactive adaptive cards: we’ve surely been waiting for this. Very important for bridging the user experiences across different tools in different MS clouds (Office, Dynamics, Power Apps). Could 2020 be the year of the Adaptive Cards? Potentially yes, if you look at how Teams & Power Automate can make use of this feature.

    UI Flows solution awareness: aligning RPA with the common shipping vehicle of Power Platform. Being a new preview feature, there’s of course a lot of other parts moving around still, but the important bit from a platform play perspective is getting everything to play nice with solutions (including non-UI Flows…)

    Use business process flows in Office 365 apps: interesting yet logical step. From a process automation perspective there’s no reason to keep BPF functionality tied too closely with the familiar CRM sales process stages mentality. Again, it’s the platform that counts.

    Power Platform governance and administration

    Environment life cycle support: much needed in the real world implementations. To be able to test new standard and custom features in complex business systems, copying and deleting environments needs to be compatible with all the platform components used. Power Automate, Canvas apps etc. have to support healthy ALM patterns for enterprise development scenarios.

    User access diagnostic experience: again, very much needed for keeping larger environments operating the way IT would want them to. The process of managing access to applications should be isolated from the actual app maker tools or features specific for Dynamics 365 admins, to ensure there’s help available on a broad enough level when users encounter problems.

    Admin connectors & PowerShell cmdlets Generally Available: because they need to be. Low-code Application Platforms for enterprise customers will have to provide automation tools for not just app creation but app governance and administration. If the number of business apps within an organization will explode thanks to these tools, trying to scale the old admin practices isn’t going to be the answer.

    Bring your own data lake: allowing customers to control their own adoption metrics for Power Apps. Just like the GUI for admin tools might not meet the requirements of all organizations, it makes sense for Microsoft to allow customers to also take the telemetry data from apps and use Azure services to put it into their own reporting context.

    Power BI

    Paginated reports enhancements: the next generation SSRS has been a long time coming. The new features like API to render a paginated report to any format (e.g., PDF, Excel) and subreport support will bring the cloud reporting powers of Power BI close to what you could do in on-prem 15 years ago. They might not be the coolest of features, but for many CRM scenarios these “pixel perfect” A4 outputs are still a very practical solution.

    Copy and paste visuals into other applications: supporting the modern flow of information. If the paginated reports represent the PC era way of working, then being able to grab a part of your analysis and quickly paste it to a conversation in Teams with a link back to the full report is the way today’s information workers expect these cloud apps to work with one another.

    Data lineage GA & enhancements: when cross-referencing data from anywhere is a breeze, how can you tell if the analysis is actually accurate? The lineage visualization is an effective way to illustrate how this modern world of self-service BI operates and bring tools to do meta-analysis on what’s the actual source of the truth being presented to you.

    Power Virtual Agent

    Add a Power Virtual Agents bot into Power Apps canvas app: because bots are not just for customer service. Internal scenarios for app users would be very interesting, although the starting price for using bots is probably going to scare most customers away.

    Adaptive Cards: see my comment in Power Automate section.

    Single Sign-On: if attempting to go beyond generic website chat popups, strong identity management features are a must.

    Pass context to a bot from the calling site: “Hi, how may I help you?” That’s not how a smart agent would initiate the chat, so after identity comes context management. Bridging the gaps between apps is where I see bots being particularly powerful, so URL query string support is a good start for making this happen.

    AI Builder

    Power Automate integration: building the Cognitive Service for citizen developers. The patterns from Azure need to become more accessible in the BizApps frame of reference.

    New models like anomaly detection and receipt scanning: making AI Builder ready for business. Training AI for unique data sets is one thing, but where I believe wider adoption will start is through these more “ready to go” scenarios.

    Common Data Model

    Empower out-of-the-box analytics: delivering on the promise of CDM. It’s all just theory until we see Microsoft deliver on those promises about making it easier to integrate data sources and analytics/AI via a common semantic model.

    CDM visualization and management experience: making CDM more than a GitHub repo. “Increased focus on growing the Common Data Model ecosystem requires enabling users to work with Common Data Model in their native data environments, such as Power Query, Insights Apps, Synapse, and Power BI.” Yes, it certainly does.