New announcements for the Power Platform. We are not only very happy with that. It is also badly needed, because the use of the Power Platform is growing rapidly. More and more organisations and employees are seeing how the Power Platform can contribute to efficiency, innovation and digital transformation. That only gets more now that the Power Platform licensing jungle is coming to an end. Microsoft has announced that it is moving to the pay-per-use model, something the community has been asking for for years. In this blog you can read all about it. 

POWER PLATFORM AND DATAVERSE AVAILABLE FOR ALL EMPLOYEES 

The great announcement that came during the Ignite 2021 Fall update is that you can now make Power Platform and Dataverse available to all employees, without them needing a license in advance. You only pay per use. You get a pay-per-use model that can be managed under the Azure Subscriptions banner.

HOW IS IT MEASURED? 

For the new cost model, Microsoft has come up with two meters: Power Apps per App meter & Dataverse Meter.

The Power Apps per App meter looks at the number of unique users in a month per application. You have to pay for that, but you no longer have to purchase a license for everyone in advance.

In addition, you have Data fresh meter. You get 2 gigabytes of Dataverse storage, 1 gigabyte for files and 1 gigabyte for data, and as long as you no longer use it, you pay nothing. The moment you need more than that 2 gigabytes, you will pay for it, per month.

WHY ARE WE SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS?

Costs are a big barrier for many organisations to get started with Power Platform. And with Power Apps to do the more complex things you need a license for, like integrating with a database. So, for data integration with external systems, the premium connectors, you need those licenses. If you want to make a beautiful application and you want to make it available to all your employees, you need a license for everyone, to give the possibility to use the application. If you have an organisation with 5000 employees, you pay 5000 x € 4.20 = € 21,000 per month. And then we assume the ‘Per App license’ without discount. That is not an accessible way to get acquainted with the platform. Logically, the threshold was high to use the Power Platform. We also regretted this because we like to help organisations with digital transformation, but this investment in advance often formed a bottleneck. With this new announcement, licensing costs are to a lesser extent a bottleneck. In the per user model, the cost per user license used is unfortunately slightly higher, namely 8.43. The use of an application is measured per month. So, if only 100 employees use the app, the costs are 843 Euro. When 1000 employees start using, it is 8430 euros.

As soon as certain employees start using multiple applications, it quickly becomes interesting to switch to the ‘per user model’ for these employees, whereby an unlimited number of applications can be used for 16.90 Euros per month. With the per User license you also get more database storage space in Dataverse, namely 250 MB per license, instead of 50 MB)

The expansion of the licensing model is a good development, which will ensure that the step to use the Power Platform becomes a bit smaller again. Do you want to know more about this? Then sign up for this webinar.

Are you curious about the other announcements for the Power Platform? Click here for an overview.

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