With the recent announcement, one thing is clear: Power Apps licensing has never been cheaper. With no licence minimums or other purchase requirements, pretty much any organization should be able to start using Power Apps now:
Although, as it usually is with licensing, there is a fly in the ointment. Those changes are coming into effect on October 1, 2021. Until then, even though there is a promotional offer of $12 ($3 on the per app plan), that offer is only applicable to the minimum purchase of 5000 licenses.
Either way, cheaper licensing is always a good thing, and I’m happy this is happening.
But, then, I still remember the time when Dynamics CRM 2011 was somewhere in the range of $40-45 per user licence, and, from there, licensing fees only kept growing.
Funny enough, current Power Apps pricing is exactly the same, but, since first-party applications are not included into that price, it only seems fair that Power Apps pricing should have been less, right? Since, after all, we are, essentially, paying for the platform access, but there is no out of the box business functionality included there.
This seems to be an ongoing problem with Power Platform licensing. We all may have some idea of what is fair and what is not. Microsoft may have some idea, too, and, as this announcement shows, they might actually be quite a bit off… to such an extent that they can cut licensing fees by 50%… but none of that is going to mean anything until, somehow, Power Platform licensing fees get translated into the resource consumption fees so that we could see underlying resource usage and associated fees.
At least that way we could clearly see how $20 or $5 translates into CPU / memory / traffic / etc usage. Apparently, there would also be some licensing fee for the “platform access”, but, right now, this is all bundled together, and, so, I’d think those prices can go up or down depending on how it all balances out in the books year after year.
Hence, it’s great the prices are going down. I think it would have been even better if there was a clear explanation of how those prices are set (in relation to the Azure resource consumption fees in general). Without that, will the price go up next year? Will it go further down? It’s kind of hard to say. Well, still, it does not change the fact that we just got much better pricing, so… have fun with Power Platform!