This content explains what organizations can do with Power Platform using only the licensing included in Microsoft 365 and highlights scenarios that require additional licensing. It breaks down capabilities and limitations across Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, and AI Builder. It also provides guidance on when businesses may need more environments, premium connectors, or expanded capacity for automation and data processes.
Hey y’all, this is Venice, and here at Rockhop we've been hearing from our customers that you're wondering what you can do with the 365 licensing you already have within Power Platform, and what kinds of use cases might require additional licensing. In this video, we're going to go through each of the apps within Power Platform, talk about what you can do today to get started with automation in your company, and what to consider when looking at additional licensing. We won’t go into the nuances of which licenses to buy for each scenario, so let us know if you have questions about that.
We’ll start with Power Apps. Power Apps comes with a seeded version in most 365 licensing, where you can build as many apps as you want using standard connectors. Many people create impactful apps and automations by building around SharePoint data and automating processes like approvals happening through Outlook and Teams. We’ll share a link for standard connectors, and templates are available in the Power Apps Maker Portal. Be aware of the diamond icon that distinguishes standard from premium connectors. Premium connectors include things like SQL databases and Dataverse.
Once you start buying Power Apps licensing, you’ll get Dataverse capacity allocated to your tenant. It will be pooled at the tenant level unless assigned to environments. Anything using a seeded Power Apps license will be stored in the default environment. This is fine for getting started, but as you build more business-critical processes, you’ll want multiple environments for development, testing, permissions, and data controls. That need typically drives Power Apps licensing for builders or users accessing apps with premium connectors. If you want to share a Power Apps scenario with external folks, you would look at building a Power Pages site. Internal users can access it with their existing Power Apps licensing, but sharing externally requires purchasing Power Pages authentication—either authenticated or unauthenticated users.
Power Automate is similar in distinguishing standard versus premium connectors and environment creation. Beyond workflows and approvals in Outlook and Teams, you may consider things like email alerts triggered in various systems or summaries of activity over a week or month. A reason to buy a Power Automate license is if you want automation for a program with no API access and must rely on a desktop or machine. In that case, you may need to build robotic process automation, which requires licensing.
Power BI Desktop is already available through the Microsoft Store. You can connect to data and build reports there. You can also get a free Power BI license in your tenant, allowing you to publish from Power BI Desktop into your My Workspace—a personal productivity use case. When you're ready to share, you’ll need Power BI licenses for you and those you share with. Other reasons to consider licensing include maturing your data connections with dataflows or datamarts, which make it easier for business users to ingest and transform data.
Power Virtual Agents lets you build chatbots to answer common questions in your organization. Most 365 licenses support this today, and you can share the chatbot through Teams. Users can engage with it directly in Teams. Licensing becomes necessary when you want to publish the bot outside of Teams—such as on your public website or Facebook—in which case you purchase sessions for external usage.
AI Builder is an exciting capability included with Power Apps or Power Automate purchases. You get a certain number of AI Builder credits, which allow you to do things like automatically read data from receipts or business cards and write it to a data source, reducing manual processing. However, the number of credits included is lower than many expect. For example, 250 credits from a Power Apps per-app license supports about 15 receipts. As you build critical processes with AI Builder, you’ll need to ensure you have enough credits. Credits are pooled at the tenant level unless assigned to an environment. If you need more, you can buy one unit of AI Builder, which is one million credits. Microsoft has published an AI Builder calculator to help estimate how many units you’ll need based on monthly volume. Be aware of the difference in terminology between “units” and “credits.”
Alrighty—that’s the overview of how to get started with Power Platform using what you already have, and why you may need additional licensing. I hope this is helpful and gives you ideas for starting automation efforts in your organization. If you want to discuss any of these ideas or have questions, reach out to us—we’d love to talk.
