Forum Discussion
Power Automate Licensing
Whilst it may be technically possibly to use a service account and only that account is licensed, for license compliance all users that trigger the flow must be licensed.
Microsoft refer to this as multiplexing, and there is an explanation of this in the licensing guide.
Depending on how many users are tiggering the flow, how many flows etc, it may be more cost effective to license as business flows rather than each user they may trigger the flows using Power Automate per flow licensing.
Power Automate Process licenses are for unattended desktop automation, rather than cloud flows.
Hi Nick,
I appreciate the response. That's useful.
So for the below:
Instant flows (that is, flows that use a manual trigger such as a button or an item being selected) can be shared by using run-only permissions. Any user who's added as a run-only user won't have access to edit or modify the flow in any way; they'll only have permissions to trigger the flow.
If the flow is set to the Power Automate Premium user plan, then it gets the plan of its primary owner if the flow is an automated or scheduled flow. If the flow is an instant/button flow, it uses the license of the user running the flow".
This means that automated and scheduled flows can be invoked by others without a license as it will run off of the primary owners plan, but the instant flow doesn't and would run off of the user invoking the flow hence it wouldn't work for them?
Thanks,
- As I mentioned. Whilst your description of using a premium connector instant flow with a manual trigger being run (in the background) by a single licensed user account is technically possible. In my opinion it is not compliant with Microsoft's product terms and use rights, where all users triggering the flow should be licensed with a Power Automate Premium license, or you would license the business flow.
Nick_Beacroft I actually took that description direct from the Microsoft Power Automate documentation page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/create-team-flows#share-a-cloud-flow-with-run-only-permissions
So this is what made me question if it really is going out of compliance if a Premium user shared their flow for others unlicensed users to use.
But I think ultimately like you said, to remain complaint, if invoking the flow that uses premium connectors you should have a Premium license assigned, if just standard connectors this will be enough with just a P-Automate Basic license assigned (included with many M365 licenses).
Thanks,