Businesses need flexible and efficient billing solutions in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. A standout Microsoft Power Platform feature is the pay-as-you-go billing plan. This blog post will guide you through the capabilities the pay-as-you-go billing model on the Power Platform offers to optimize the licensing costs.
Understanding the Pay-as-you-go billing model
With pay-as-you-go, users only pay for what they use without risking excessive charges. This enables organisations to adopt the capabilities provided by Power Apps in a smoothly efficient way.
Let’s look at this with a few scenarios:
- Development & Testing: Instead of purchasing another Power Apps program, such as Power Apps Developer or Power Apps Premium, an organization can choose a pay-as-you-go billing program. This consequently gives them the choice to increase or decrease the number of licensed users during the development and testing phases, thus optimizing their spending.
- Segregation of an organization’s expenses: An organization can leverage an easy path to spread the cost of licensing and usage of the Power Platform across multiple departments.
- Project-based work: Project-based organizations and consultants that usually work on multiple short-term projects (i.e. projects lasting less than one year). Each project may require different layers of Power Platform services consumption.
- Employee Onboarding: An organisation can use the pay-as-you-go model for probationary employees or student interns without purchasing annual licences.
Power Apps Pay-as-you-go model Pros & Cons
Pros
- Scalability: Add or remove users with no initial licensing costs.
- Monitoring: Ability to monitor costs related to the Power Platform through the Azure Cost Management portal that enables the breakdown of charges.
- Engagement: There is no need to commit to a fixed plan to get charged a monthly or one-off annual fee.
Cons
- Predictability: Hard to forecast costs
- Azure depended: It requires an active Azure subscription for billing (this is a con only for those who are unfamiliar with Azure)
Power App licenses Comparison
- Power Apps pay-as-you-go allows individual users to run apps (an app) without being tied to a paid license by having nothing more than an Azure subscription
- Power Apps Premium per-user license allows the licensed user to create, modify and run unlimited custom applications and access unlimited websites for a fee of €18.12/user/month.
- Power Apps per app empowers individuals to run (a custom app or access a Power Pages site) for a particular business scenario based on the complete capabilities of Power Apps for $5/user/app/month.
Related links
- Set up pay-as-you-go billing policy in Power Platform
- Pay-as-you-go plan
- Pay-as-you-go meters
- Power Platform licensing FAQs
Wrap up
The Pay-as-you-go approach for Power Apps offers flexible, consumption-based pricing, allowing businesses to pay only for their app usage. Ideal for organizations with unpredictable demand, it gets rid of upfront expenses and expands easily resulting in a cheaper option than set plans such as Per App or per-user licensing.