June 30- Every Microsoft Partner knows the importance of the date. June 30th is Microsoft’s fiscal year end, signaling a lot of last minute closed deals and expiration of promotional pricing. Well, this year Microsoft surprised the Power Platform community by slashing license pricing for Power Apps by 50%. With these Power Apps price changes, Microsoft is making it easy for companies all over the world to make the Power Platform the development platform of choice for Low Code/No Code development.
The new Microsoft Power Apps Pricing model
Organizations purchase Power Apps licenses on a per user/per month basis. The current rack rate for US purchasers is $US 10/user/month for a single Power App or $US 40/user/month for unlimited Power Apps. Licenses are delivered as “passes” which give users access to identified Apps. Administrators can distribute these passes to users who need access to various Power Apps from a pool of passes that the organization has created- and remove them when no longer needed.
MIcrosoft’s announcement reduced these prices by 50%. Per App pricing is now $US 5 per month, while unlimited App pricing is only $US 20 per user per month. This new scheme will become available October 1, 2021 and will be available through your CSP.
What can we do with a Power Apps license?
Each Power Apps license includes certain entitlements including storage and API access.
In addition, Power Apps entitlements and features include:
- Dataverse – the premium back end for data storage
- 50MB Database capacity per licensed user, pooled across the entire tenant
- 400MB File capacity per licensed user, pooled across the entire tenant
- Prebuilt and custom connectors to access your data in other applications
- Build Model Drive, Canvas, or Portal Applications
- Create Power Automate flows using premium connectors
- API requests subject to limitations and allocations on a per organization basis
Power Apps Licensing Strategies
There are several strategies that result from this new pricing and your organization should review before purchasing.
System Administrators and Developers should be assigned an unlimited App license. $20 per month is an immaterial cost to provide them with the ability to develop and maintain applications throughout your organization.
Power App End users will only require app passes for the Apps that they will need access to. Five dollars per month, to use the usual comparison, is less than a cup of really good coffee. The return on this small investment would be amazing.
Dataverse for Teams developers should consider converting their apps to full Power Apps to take advantage of the increased
Dynamics 365 prospects should consider whether a custom Power App would be better than using the First Party Apps (Sales, Customer Service, etc) . Many companies use a small portion of the full Dynamics 365 CE Stack and a custom built Power App could be a better fit. Power Apps license also cost almost 1/10th of the cost of Sales Enterprise.
