Power Automate Previews Expensive Pay-As-You-Go Plan

• A new pay-as-you-go Power Automate plan charges customers each time a flow runs.
• The new plan will only make sense in a few scenarios, such as once-monthly business processes.

Power Automate is joining Power Apps in introducing a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) usage plan, which could lessen an organization’s need for long-term user licensing and help administrators distribute costs internally. However, the Power Automate plan is more expensive than per-flow licensing in all but a few cases.

Power Automate Plans

Power Automate is a graphical workflow automation engine that runs in Azure and shares technology with the Azure Logic Apps service. Power Automate originally helped knowledgeable subject matter expert users to create lightweight workflows (called “flows”) in Dynamics 365, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft 365 Apps, but its scope has expanded to include more general application integration, access to machine learning, and support for unattended process automation.

The service supports cloud flows, which are automations that run on Azure to automate line-of-business processes and which can be triggered either by an event or manually (such as with a button click), and desktop flows, which execute on a user’s machine to automate common tasks.