Elements of Power Platform Services

Power Platform services—including Power Apps and Power Automate—are designed to allow novice users to build low-code apps, workflows, and Web sites. Despite a common family name, each service has a different licensing scheme and there is no suite license that covers the use of all services. A set of pay-as-you-go offerings provides usage-based, rather than per-user, billing for these services; they can limit costs in narrow scenarios like early testing and capacity estimation but will usually be too expensive to use in production.

Like most Power Platform services, Power Apps and Power Automate can be licensed in one of two ways:

• Rights granted by a license for another service, such as a Microsoft 365 E3 license or a Dynamics 365 Sales license
• A full Power Apps or Power Automate license.

An application’s license requirements depend on its technical requirements in four areas: Capacity, connectors, Dataverse, and add-ons.

Capacity

Power Apps and Power Automate are metered based on API usage—a total count of programmatic calls made each day, tracked per-user and limited to prevent runaway processes and reduce system overuse. Plans provide different daily request capacity limits, with “free” allowances from a license such as Microsoft 365 offering a lower daily threshold. Capacity limits affect how many times an app can be run per day, or how many apps a user can run on a single license.