Microsoft changes to the Power Apps license could see customers paying 10 times more

Microsoft apparently made some drastic changes to the Power Apps license, which would force customers to move into more expensive licensing, according to a now-deleted blog post.

The new rules would have seen multiple software-developing organizations using the platform, having to move users from the Power Apps license to the Dynamics 365 Enterprise, which is, more or less, ten times more expensive.

Under previous rules, users would be able to access data in Dynamics 365 Enterprise, as long as they didn’t modify it in restricted labels. However, under the new rules, the definition of restricted labels changed in a way that would have increased licensing costs.

The rules would also add more non-restricted policies to the list of restricted data, and accessing them would have required a full Dynamics 365 Enterprise license, effectively forcing customers to pay more for the same services they once had with their Power Apps license.

For a comparison, imagine this:

• A Power Apps subscription is currently priced at $20 per month.
• Dynamics 365 subscriptions are priced as follows:
  • Dynamics 365 Team Member is $8 per user per month
  • Dynamics 365 CRM Enterprise licenses are $95 per user per month

An organization of 1000 employees paying for 1000 Power Apps subscriptions would pay $240,000 per year, while the same organization would pay $1.14 million per year for the monthly Dynamics 365 CRM Enterprise licenses, almost 10 times more.

However, after being questioned for clarification, Microsoft decided to delete its blog post where the company discussed the changes, and it released a statement through The Register, saying:

We are not introducing any changes or updates to our licensing requirements for Dynamics 365 or Power Apps solutions. The new Solution Checker provides an improved and simplified way for customers to understand licensing requirements and optimize user licensing.

The Solution Checker specifically addresses adherence to the most common Dynamics 365 Sales license requirements when building custom Power Apps applications. These new capabilities, along with upcoming new tools and features reports, first cover Dynamics 365 Sales and will be extended to additional Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement workloads soon.

Microsoft

Dynamics 365 recently saw the integration of the Nuvei services, which could be a game-changer for SMBs. However, those SMBs focusing on developing software could be equally affected by these new licensing rules.