Power Apps Licensing: Why We Now Recommend Premium First
Power Apps licensing determines what your organisation can actually build, not merely what it pays. The standard entitlement bundled with Microsoft 365 covers basic canvas apps built on standard connectors, while premium licensing unlocks Dataverse, premium connectors and the governance controls that come with them. The gap between those two positions is wider than the price difference suggests.
The mistake we see most often is organisations trying to do everything with standard licensing, without any thought given to how the platform will grow. It works for the first app. It usually works for the second. The wall arrives when someone needs a proper data source, or a connector to a line-of-business system, and the architecture has to be unpicked rather than extended.
I used to advise the opposite. Start standard, prove the value, upgrade when you hit the limits. I have changed my position on that, and I now recommend considering premium from the outset. Not because it earns Microsoft more, but because of what it gives you: flexibility in what you can build, control over how it is built, and the governance tooling to keep it in order as it grows.
That recommendation has a clear exception, and it matters as much as the rule. If you are only playing with the Power Platform, do not go premium. Premium licensing is part of a strategy, and it only pays back if the strategy is actually implemented and stuck to.
Quick summary
The licensing decision shapes the architecture, which is why it is worth making deliberately:
Licensing value improves the more you use the platform. A single app rarely justifies premium. A connected suite of solutions almost always does, which is why the decision belongs alongside the strategy rather than after it.
What you actually get without paying anything
Most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans include Power Apps rights, and that entitlement is genuinely useful. It covers canvas apps built on standard connectors, with SharePoint lists as the usual data source, and it is enough to build something that solves a real problem.
What it does not include is Dataverse, premium connectors, or model-driven apps. That means no connection to SQL Server, Salesforce, or most line-of-business systems, and no relational data platform underneath what you build.
For a first app, none of that matters. The seeded entitlement is a reasonable place to prove that low-code has value in your organisation, and we would not tell anyone to buy licences before they have done that.
The mistake we see most often
The problem is not starting on standard licensing. It is staying there without a plan.
What happens repeatedly is that an organisation builds its first app on SharePoint lists, it works, and demand grows. A second app follows, then a third, each one built the same way because that is what the licensing allows. By the time someone needs a genuine data source, or an integration with a system that requires a premium connector, there are several applications resting on foundations that were never intended to carry them.
At that point the upgrade is not a licensing decision. It is a rebuild. The apps work, so nobody wants to touch them, and the organisation ends up maintaining a set of solutions it has outgrown because unpicking them costs more than living with them.
That is the cost that never appears in a licensing comparison, and it is the reason the decision deserves attention earlier than most organisations give it.
Why we now recommend premium first
I have changed my position on this, and it is worth being explicit about that rather than presenting it as settled wisdom.
The old advice, start standard and upgrade when you hit the limits, is defensible and I gave it for years. What changed my mind is watching what the limits actually do to an organisation’s architecture, and recognising that the constraint shapes what people build long before it stops them building.
The case for premium is not mainly about capability, although Dataverse and premium connectors matter. It is about three things:
Flexibility. You build the right solution rather than the solution the licence permits. Standard licensing quietly pushes every problem towards a SharePoint list, whether or not that is the correct answer.
Control. A relational data platform with proper security and validation behaves differently to a list with a form on top, particularly once more than one person depends on it.
Governance. Premium brings the managed environment tooling that lets you see and control what is being built. Without it, governance becomes a manual exercise, which is the same problem covered in our post on why Power Platform governance fails in growing organisations.
To be clear about the obvious objection: recommending the more expensive licence is not a comfortable position for a partner, and it is not one we take because it benefits Microsoft. We take it because the organisations that commit early build better, and the ones that defer spend the saving twice over when they rebuild.
Where the value actually comes from
Licensing economics on the Power Platform work differently to most software, and this is the part organisations tend to miss.
A single application rarely justifies a premium licence on its own. Measured against one app, the cost looks poor and the business case is hard to make. Measured against a suite of solutions that share a data platform, integrate with each other and address several business problems, the same licence looks entirely different.
The more you use the platform, the better the value of the licences. That sounds obvious, but it inverts how most licensing decisions get made, which is by costing the immediate project rather than the intended direction. The right question is not what this app needs. It is what the business is trying to achieve over the next few years, and what it would be worth to get there.
This is why we spend time on long-term growth planning before recommending a licensing model. It is not a procurement exercise, it is a question about business value, and the answer changes depending on how seriously the organisation intends to use the platform.
Who should not buy premium
Being straight about this matters, because premium-first is a recommendation, not a rule.
If your organisation is exploring the Power Platform rather than adopting it, premium is the wrong purchase. Someone experimenting, prototyping, or testing whether low-code fits should use the seeded entitlement or the free developer plan, and should not be paying for capability they are not yet in a position to use.
The distinction is commitment rather than size. Premium licensing is part of a strategy, and it only returns value if that strategy is implemented and stuck to. An organisation that buys premium licences, builds one app and moves on has wasted the money regardless of how large it is. An organisation that is genuinely committed to building on the platform benefits from premium almost immediately.
If you cannot yet say what you intend to build beyond the first thing, that is a signal to wait, and to spend the time on the strategy instead.
What the licences actually cost
As of August 2026, Power Apps Premium costs £15.40 per user per month on an annual commitment paid up front, or £16.17 per user per month if you pay monthly.
That difference is smaller than it looks per user and larger than it looks across a tenant. Annual commitment works out at £184.80 per user per year against £194.04 for monthly, so roughly a five per cent saving in exchange for committing for the year. For fifty users that is around £460 a year, which is worth having but is not usually the deciding factor. The more useful question is whether you are confident enough in the direction to commit for twelve months, and if you are not, the monthly option costs little enough to be a reasonable way to buy thinking time.
Worth noting that licence cost is rarely the whole cost. Dataverse capacity, AI Builder credits, Power Automate licensing and Power Pages access for external users all sit outside the base figure, and any budget built purely on the per-user price will be short. These are worth establishing before a project is costed rather than after.
What happened to the Per App plan
The cheap entry point most organisations used to start with has largely closed, and the way it closed is worth understanding because it affects different customers differently.
Power Apps Per App, at roughly £4 per user per app per month, was the obvious way to license a single application for a defined group of users. In January 2026 it disappeared from the Power Platform Licensing Guide without any announcement. Microsoft published an explanation on 14 January, two weeks after the change, confirming that effective 2 January 2026 the SKU is no longer available for purchase by new customers. A further clarification followed on 6 March.
What matters is that this is an end of sale rather than an end of life, and the impact depends entirely on how you buy your licences.
Enterprise Agreement customers are largely unaffected. You can continue to use and renew Per App, including after your current agreement ends, and you can add or adjust user numbers through the standard annual true-up rather than raising individual purchase orders.
CSP customers are also unaffected, and this is the part that caught people out. Microsoft’s March clarification confirmed that both existing and new CSP customers can continue to purchase, use and renew Per App, and the SKU returned to CSP price lists in early April 2026. Anyone who read the January coverage and concluded the licence was gone may have acted on incomplete information.
MPSA customers are the ones genuinely affected. The SKU is no longer offered, existing agreements remain valid until they expire, and there is then a 60-day window to move to something else.
New customers buying outside CSP cannot purchase it at all.
The alternatives are Power Apps Premium or pay-as-you-go, and for anyone forced to move, the cost increase is significant. Licensing specialists have put the jump at somewhere between 100 and 300 per cent depending on how the original licences were deployed.
There is a footnote to this that supports the wider argument in this post. Per App was never properly enforceable. The original 2019 definition allowed a user to run two apps and one portal within an environment, and Microsoft’s product team never built the technical controls to police it. The 2021 revision simplified it to one app per licence, but the underlying problem remained. A licence that cannot be enforced offers the appearance of control rather than the substance of it, which is precisely the distinction that makes premium worth considering in the first place.
The bottom line on Power Apps licensing
Power Apps licensing is usually treated as a procurement question and answered by costing the immediate project. That is how organisations end up with a portfolio of applications built on foundations chosen by a licence rather than by the problem.
Our position is that premium deserves consideration from the outset, for the flexibility, control and governance it brings rather than for the feature list. That position comes with a genuine exception: if the platform is being explored rather than adopted, the seeded entitlement is the right place to be and premium can wait. What does not work is building seriously on standard licensing while intending to grow, because the bill for that arrives as a rebuild rather than an invoice.
Our Power Apps Consultancy team works through this decision with organisations regularly, usually as part of a wider conversation about what the platform is actually for.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Frequently asked questions
The licensing questions clients actually put to us, answered, including the ones where the honest answer is to spend less.
Is Power Apps free with Microsoft 365?
Power Apps rights are included with most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans, covering canvas apps built on standard connectors. That entitlement excludes Dataverse, premium connectors and model-driven apps, so while it is genuinely useful for a first application, it is not the full platform.
What is the difference between standard and premium Power Apps licensing?
Standard rights allow canvas apps on standard connectors, typically using SharePoint lists as the data source. Premium licensing adds Dataverse as a relational data platform, premium connectors for line-of-business systems such as SQL Server and Salesforce, model-driven apps, and the managed environment governance tooling.
Should we start with standard licensing and upgrade later?
That was our advice for a long time and we have changed it. The problem is that the constraint shapes what gets built, so by the time an organisation reaches the limits it usually has several applications resting on foundations chosen by the licence rather than the requirement. Upgrading then becomes a rebuild rather than a purchase.
When is premium licensing the wrong choice?
When the Power Platform is being explored rather than adopted. If you are prototyping, experimenting, or testing whether low-code suits your organisation, the seeded entitlement or the free developer plan is the right place to be. Premium is part of a strategy and only returns value if that strategy is followed through.
Does one app justify a premium licence?
Rarely. Licensing value on the Power Platform improves with use, so a single application measured on its own tends to make a poor case. A connected suite of solutions sharing a data platform changes the calculation considerably, which is why the decision should follow the intended direction rather than the immediate project.
Can we still buy the Power Apps Per App licence?
It depends on how you buy. Microsoft ended new sales of the Per App SKU on 2 January 2026, but the impact varies by channel. Enterprise Agreement customers can continue to use and renew it, including adding users at true-up. CSP customers, both existing and new, are unaffected and the SKU returned to CSP price lists in April 2026. MPSA customers can use it until their agreement expires and then have 60 days to migrate. New customers buying outside CSP cannot purchase it. This is an end of sale rather than an end of life, and Microsoft has stated there are no end-of-life plans for the SKU.
What should we do if we are losing access to Per App?
The alternatives are Power Apps Premium or pay-as-you-go, and it is worth being realistic that this is a meaningful cost increase, with licensing specialists putting it between 100 and 300 per cent depending on how the original licences were deployed. If a migration is forced on you, it is a reasonable moment to reconsider the architecture rather than simply swapping the licence, since the constraints that shaped what you built are the ones about to change.
How much does Power Apps Premium cost in the UK?
As of August 2026, Power Apps Premium is £15.40 per user per month on an annual commitment paid up front, or £16.17 per user per month paid monthly. That works out at £184.80 against £194.04 per user per year, so the annual commitment saves around five per cent. Licence cost is not the whole cost, though: Dataverse capacity, AI Builder credits, Power Automate licensing and external user access all sit outside that figure.
What costs are not covered by the Power Apps licence?
Dataverse capacity, AI Builder credits, Power Automate licensing and Power Pages access for external users all sit outside the base per-user figure. A budget built only on the licence price will usually be short, and these are worth establishing before a project is costed rather than after.
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