Power Automate

What Power Automate does

Power Automate is Microsoft's automation service: cloud flows between apps, desktop flows (RPA) that a person runs attended, and unattended desktop automation run by bots. The Premium plan covers cloud flows, attended desktop flows and process mining for one user; Process and Hosted Process license bots for unattended work.

How licences and requests are counted

There is no task meter. Each licence has a daily limit of Power Platform requests, and every connector call, HTTP action and built-in action counts, down to initialising a variable, whether it succeeds or fails, including retries and pagination. A Premium user gets 40,000 requests per 24 hours. A Process licence gives one flow its own 250,000 requests per 24 hours; more licences can be stacked on a flow, or one licence shared by up to 25 flows in a flow group.

A cloud flow runs on its owner's licence. If the owner leaves the organisation, the flow falls back to the lowest performance profile, so assign important flows to a stable owner or a Process licence.

What you pay

Premium costs USD 15 per user a month, paid yearly (USD 180 a year per user). Process costs USD 150 per bot a month, paid yearly (USD 1,800 a year per bot), and Hosted Process costs USD 215 per bot a month (USD 2,580 a year) with a Microsoft-managed virtual machine on Azure. One bot runs one unattended desktop flow at a time. Microsoft notes that the checkout shows the actual price for your country and organisation; taxes are not stated.

AI agents are billed separately in Copilot Credits through Copilot Studio, which is sold as prepaid credits, up to 20% cheaper bought up front, with pay-as-you-go cover when they run out. Agent flows are metered there, not against request limits. No credit price is shown on the pricing page.

Limits that change the choice

Scheduled flows can run as often as every 60 seconds. The 30-day trial covers cloud flows with standard connectors, and flows that use a custom connector need a premium or trial licence. Above the request limits Microsoft may throttle, and a flow throttled consistently for 14 days is turned off. Extra capacity comes from a Process licence for the flow or from requests add-ons of 50,000 requests per 24 hours each.

What the documentation leaves open

The pricing page shows only yearly payment, so month-to-month terms are not stated. The prices of the requests add-on and of Copilot Credits are not on the page. The copy reviewed showed "This product is not available in your market" beside each plan, so check availability in your country before planning a purchase.

When to compare alternatives

If your apps are mostly outside Microsoft, compare Zapier, which publishes task tiers and polling intervals and counts only successful actions. For enterprise integration across many systems on a negotiated contract, compare Workato.

Before you buy

Decide which flows run attended under a user and which need unattended bots. Estimate each flow's daily actions, counting built-in actions, failures and retries, against 40,000 requests per Premium user or 250,000 per Process licence. Start with the 30-day trial using standard connectors.