Two Power Automate Scenarios with Different Licensing

​Power Automate license requirements can depend on subtle details of a flow. This illustration shows two scenarios in which flows perform similar activities but have different licensing requirements.

In scenario 1, on the left, a user runs a flow that retrieves data and automatically sends it to 1,000 users. According to licensing rules that Microsoft has documented only recently, each user receives “indirect value” from the flow, so each of the 1,000 users plus the user who runs the flow need a Power Automate per-user license.

If the user runs the flow shown in the diagram on the right, saves the same data locally, and then manually e-mails it to the same 1,000 users, only the user running the flow and saving the report is required to hold a Power Automate license. In each diagram, the actions within the red box determine the licensing requirements for the organization.

While this might seem counterintuitive, it is similar to how Microsoft licenses reporting services such as Power BI Pro and SQL Server.