Licensing Service Accounts in Power Platform

• Service accounts are Azure Active Directory accounts not associated with a human user.
• Microsoft recommends service accounts to remove reliance on individuals when deploying apps and flows to an enterprise.
• Shared service accounts must be fully licensed and cannot be used to reduce the number of licenses an organization must purchase.

Microsoft recommends the use of service accounts—Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts not associated with a specific human user—to own and execute Power Automate flows and Power Apps applications when deployed in production. However, using these accounts are not without licensing risks: Organizations must be wary of multiplexing and resource access issues when including service accounts in Power Platform implementations, especially when the service account credentials are shared between several administrators. Using Power Automate Per-Flow licenses can dramatically lessen these risks.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Service Accounts

A service account is an AAD user account that represents a nonhuman entity such as application, API, or a service. In some cases, they can replace a human user; for example, a service account can be the owner of an app or flow, replacing the human user who created it. The service account has its own set of credentials, so administrators can use these credentials to sign in as the service account to perform administrative tasks on any apps or flows it owns. Assigning a service account as an app or flow owner in production is recommended by Microsoft because: