Announcing public preview of pay-as-you-go for Power Automate
We are excited to announce a new flexible way for you to pay for Power Automate. Currently, admins must predict licensing needs in advance, purchase licenses and assign them to makers for them to start using premium features of Power Automate. While it works for situations where admins understand the 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/down usage. 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 the usage patterns.
Test the waters
When building enterprise flows 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. 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 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 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.
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/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 Power Platform admin center and move users to standalone licenses for optimal pricing. For more details about how flow run charges work please review our 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 desktop flows, there will only be a single charge for the parent flow run, no charges will be incurred for child flow runs.
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 the Power Platform.
If your organization already has one or more 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 documentation, will result in charges to your Azure subscription.
Check out this video for a deep dive on Power Automate Pay-as-you-go plan
aka.ms/PowerAutomatePaygovideo
Please give it a try and share your thoughts!
Questions: Power Automate community forum
