@Ab3l
The main difference is actually that you don't get access to Premium functionality in the Free plan. By this I mean the Premium connectors cannot be used in the Free plan. Please note that the possibility not to use Premium is also even in some paid plans - only some specific paid plans have access to Premium Flow Actions / Triggers.
There are also Premium Connectors in Power Apps as well and a similar caveat applies there too.
There are some important subtle limitations as well though, I see that you state some places say 750 "tasks" a month (not sure what that is, but that sounds like Flow Run billing, something which doesn't apply anymore from a while now) - and 'hourly based limits' in other places.
Regarding clarification the more subtle limitations, here are the details:
Free plans have 'Low' Performance Profile. on the Flows. I'll detail what this might mean to you with practical differences in the limits, later in the post. Notice how according to the below reference, Power Automate Plan 1 and Power Apps Plan 1, as well as Microsoft 365 Plans, and all trials, have Low performance profile as well, even if they are paid plans.
These differences would apply Per-Flow I believe.
Power Apps Plan 2 (per user), Power Automate Plan 2 are the main plans which jump it up to MediumLow2.
Notice that there is a 'Medium' for some of the Flows. Please note that even in the Free Plan, it might be possible that some Flows which fit that specific criteria might still run on 'Medium' even in Free plan.
From Limits for automated, scheduled, and instant flows - Perfomance Profiles (docs.microsoft.com)
Flows have different limits depending on their performance profile. There are five possible values, depending on the flow owner's plan.
NOTE: In the above, Microsoft 365 plan where it says "Low" would likely also be where "Office 365 plan" falls under as well and would be the same as that one, I believe.
If you have the Power Automate plan that is dedicated and has to be paid for each Flow individually, that gets High Performance Profile for all actions. Usually, you know when you really need this, and I believe it's generally for Flows that use up among the top single digit percentage of Microsoft resources of all customers - in this case, the limits are easily exceeded, and it is obvious that this plan is needed or the Flow will either be very slow or even stop working altogether as it is for a very resource-intensive use case.
Note that in some cases, Microsoft is applying the limits dynamically based on usage and the limit is a reasonable approximation. If you go over slightly, you might be fine and nothing might happen. If you go over a lot, you might be notified by Microsoft, and your resources may even stop working altogether if the usage is especially higher than the limits.
Ok, so to simplify things, let's basically go over what might be different about Low and MediumLow2 (and maybe High) since that might make things more clear.
Here are some limits which specifically are different for the performance profiles, and sometimes, by Plan too:
Limits on how long flows will remain turned on before they expire and get turned off
Notice the specific difference here is not by Performance Profile but by plan.
Basically, Flows turn off after 90 days if they are not triggered for 90 continuous days automatically on the Free, Trial, Community and Microsoft 365 Plans. Note, they are not deleted, just turned off.
To avoid this behavior, it is necessary to have another plan. Please note that even in the above plans, the Flow might be manually turned on again, but if it is undesirable to manually turn on an inactive Flow, such as for instance, if it is intentionally inactive for 90 days or more at a time, and at the 91st day the Flow was expected to work, and manual intervention periodically is not desired, then one of the plans other than the ones in bold must be purchased, as there is no such expiration limit on those plans.
Let's get into Action request limits.
An action includes whenever you go into Flow Run History and see a Green Checkmark or a Red exclamation Point - that includes the run of the Trigger itself, and the run of every Action block - each time this happens, this is known as an Action. In some cases, if the connector retried something, each of those retries is an Action Request. Please note this is not meant to be exhaustive, and it is possible that some Connectors single Action use more than one Action request in some cases. Please note that each iteration of an Apply to Each counts. For example, suppose an Apply to each with 5 Compose Actions (assume all of them are on the same branch and are always run) and 10 iterations. That Flow Run would count as not 5 Action requests, but actually, 50 Action requests. Please also note, this is incurred for every single Flow run and not for the Flow itself. If the above Flow was run 5 times, that would be approx. 250 Action requests incurred in total (probably a bit more than that since the Trigger itself probably counts as one, etc.)
See below reference:
There are limits to the number of actions a cloud flow can run. These runs are counted for all types of actions, including connector actions, HTTP actions, and built-in actions from initializing variables to a simple compose action. Both succeeded and failed actions count towards these limits. Additionally, retries and additional requests from pagination count as action runs. You can see the number of actions your flow has run by selecting Analytics from the flow details page and looking at the Actions tab.
Taking the above table as example, a specific Flow could only have about 2,000 Action requests per 24 hours (across all Flow runs in that 24 hour period for that specific Flow) - e.g. under Free plan. whereas that same Flow would be able to have about 5,000 om MediumLow1 (i.e. if having the PowerApps Plan 2 per-user plan, for example). However, please keep in mind the below too:
Please note there is, in addition to the above, also a specific limit applying to entire Tenant and per-user, that means it applies to ALL Flow Action Requests taken together, plus ALL API requests generated by ALL Canvas Apps taken together, plus ALL API requests generated by usage of Model Driven Apps, plus ALL API requests generated by usage of Dynamics 365 products (including just using them out of the box), and any other related activity.
These are probably the main limits to keep in mind:
The limits below can be one of the reasons to need to purchase a per-Flow plan for example, which I believe would not be subject to those specific limits below:
All the users of Microsoft Power Platform have limits on the number of requests based on the license they are assigned. The following table defines the number of requests a user can make in a 24-hour period:
1 Dynamics 365 Enterprise applications include Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Dynamics 365 HR, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement plan, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
2 Dynamics 365 Professional includes Dynamics 365 Sales Professional, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional.
3 The per user plans include the previous Plan 1 and Plan 2.
4 See Appendix B for Microsoft 365 licenses that include Power Apps and Power Automate capabilities in the Licensing Guide.
If a user has multiple plans assigned from different product lines, the total number of requests allowed would be the sum of requests allocated to each license type. For example, if a user has both a Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise license as well as a Power Apps per user license then that user will have a total of 20000 + 5000 = 25000 requests available per 24 hours.
If a user has multiple licenses allocated within the same product line, for example if a user has a Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise license as the base license and a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license attached, the total number of requests would be what is provided by the base license - Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
So in the example of the above, a Flow that is owned by a specific User could only run at most about 5,000 action requests (maybe even less, if they also user Power Apps Canvas, etc.) across ALL Flows in a 24 hour period. In order for this limit to be higher, you can see references at bottom of post of two ways to raise this.
Also in case it helps:
Requests in Microsoft Power Platform consist of various actions that a user makes across various products. At a high level, below is what constitute an API request:
- Power Apps – all API requests to connectors and Microsoft Dataverse.
- Power Automate – all API requests to connectors, process advisor analysis, HTTP actions, and built-in actions from initializing variables to a simple compose action. Both succeeded and failed actions count towards these limits. Additionally, retries and other requests from pagination count as action executions as well.
- Power Virtual Agents - API requests (or calls) to Power Automate flows from within a chatbot conversation.
- Dataverse (formerly Common Data Service) – all create, read, update, and delete (CRUD), assign, and share operations including user-driven and internal system requests required to complete CRUD transactions, and special operations like share or assign. These can be from any client or application and using any endpoint (SOAP or REST). These include, but are not limited to, plug-ins, classic workflows, and custom controls making the earlier-mentioned operations.
For Dataverse, there is a small set of system internal operations that are excluded from limits, such as login, logout, and system metadata operations.
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I would advise you not to worry about it unless you are seeing yourself hitting above the limits, which your admin can check in the Power Platform Admin Center
There is a way to raise the tenant limit, like this:
2 ways to raise the tenant limits:
A Power Apps and Power Automate capacity add-on allows customers to increase the limits for a given user. These will be assignable to any user who has a Power Apps, Power Automate, or applicable Dynamics 365 license.
Each capacity add-on raises the request limits by another 10,000 per 24 hours. Multiple capacity add-ons can also be assigned to the same user.
Another point to know is "non-interactive" users have their own "shared pool capacity" that is completely separate from the regular users, the whole pool is shared across all these users, but this quota won't even be touched unless you use one of these specific kind of users only - so this can be an option for you to create one of these kinds of users depending on the scenario. (though they cannot be logged into by a user, but by a "bot" or program-atically only):
Here are some more details:
Dataverse enables you to have identities that do not require any user license to interact with the service. There are four types of these users:
Additionally there are special free ($0) licenses, which are used to interact with Dynamics 365 applications like Dynamics 365 Marketing. See How Marketing is licensed.
For these identities, every tenant will get base request capacity per tenant that can only be used by these users and not by users with standard licenses.
This base request capacity is based on the type of subscription, as follows:
- If a tenant has at least one Dynamics 365 enterprise subscription, they will get 100,000 requests per 24 hours.
- If a tenant has at least one Dynamics 365 professional subscription, they will get 50,000 requests per 24 hours.
- If a tenant has at least one Microsoft Power Apps or Power Automate subscription, they will get 25,000 requests per 24 hours.
If a tenant has multiple types of subscriptions, their base request capacity will use the subscription with the larger number of requests. For example, if a customer has both Dynamics 365 Customer Service (100,000 requests) and Power Apps per user (25,000 requests) subscriptions, their base request capacity will be 100,000 requests per 24 hours.
Base request capacity is defined at the tenant level and can only be used by non-licensed users, application users, and users who have free ($0) licenses.
After base request capacity is exhausted, customers can increase this capacity by purchasing a Power Apps and Power Automate capacity add-on.
The Power Automate per flow plan allows capacity to be specifically reserved for a single flow, irrespective of the owner of the flow. Each flow assigned to the per flow plan gets 15,000 per 24 hours. This does not use the base request capacity at the tenant level.
Please note the Non-Interactive user might be for Dataverse related operations only, I am not sure they work for Power Automate. The main option for Power Automate is likely to purchase the capacity add-on. For Flows, depending on scenario the per-Flow plan may be applicable as well.
Check if it helps.
Here are some other Performance Profile related limits to keep in mind:
(from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/limits-and-config#action-request-limits)
| Apply to each array items |
5,000 for Low, 100,000 for all others |
This limit describes the highest number of array items that a "apply to each" loop can process.
To filter larger arrays, you can use the query action. |
| Split on items |
- 5,000 for Low without trigger concurrency
- 100,000 for all others without trigger concurrency
- 100 with trigger concurrency |
For triggers that return an array, you can specify an expression that uses a 'SplitOn' property that splits or debatches array items into multiple workflow instances for processing, rather than use a "Foreach" loop. This expression references the array to use for creating and running a workflow instance for each array item.
Note: When concurrency is turned on, the Split on limit is reduced to 100 items. |
| |
|
|
| Paginated items |
5,000 for Low, 100,000 for all others |
To process more items, trigger multiple flow runs over your data. |
| Read calls per 5 minutes |
6,000 for Low, 60,000 for all others |
This limit applies to calls that get the raw inputs and outputs from a cloud flow's run history. You can distribute the workload across more than one flow as necessary. |
| Invoke calls per 5 minutes |
4,500 for Low, 45,000 for all others |
You can distribute workload across more t |
CONTENT THROUGHPUT LIMITS
| Name |
Limit |
Notes |
| Content throughput per 5 minutes |
600 MB for Low, 6 GB for all others |
You can distribute workload across more than one flow as necessary. |
| Content throughput per 24 hours |
1 GB for Low, 10 GB for MediumLow1, MediumLow2 and Medium, 50 GB for High |
You can distribute workload across more than one flow as necessary. |
Check if it helps.
Also regarding Power Automate specifically, and regarding the per-Flow plan - you may want to check with Microsoft, but I believe that if you use a per-Flow plan, the capacity for that specific Flow, which is 15,000 Action requests per 24 hours, is dedicated to that Flow and in that specific case only will not be applied any tenant limits to it, only the Power Automate related limits for High might be applied to it.
For most of your use cases, such as if you are experimenting with it, Free Power Automate / Microsoft 365/Office365 Power Automate could be good enough for you. If the trial has not been used up, you can also start a trial of it.
Please note that if you are developing or testing, you can access for dev/testing (but not use in production) a Community Plan for free and see if that helps as well. You cannot share Flows or do anything in there that should be done in production environment, and it is separate, but it is also free. There is some confusion as to whether the Community Plan allows use of Premium Triggers and Actions from Power Automate (such as the HTTP Action, for example, which as of this writing is a premium acion), and not just Premium Connectors from Power Apps (i.e. Power Apps Canvas Apps). Although I am not 100% sure on it, I believe the answer is, yes you can use Premium Triggers and Actions from Power Automate in the Developer plan - if it does not work try it on https://us.flow.microsoft.com/ URL to access it, instead of make.powerapps.com (after getting the developer plan) and see if you can use Premium connector. Please note that if you somehow get anything to work in a Developer plan, such as including Premium Triggers and Actions in the Community Plan that way. Even if you do not share the Flow with users (which the system will prevent you from doing) - you are not to use it in production (even if you somehow figure out how to use it in production with the restrictions) without buying a plan (or you can use Power Automate Free, Office 365 or whichever plan you already have without Premium connectors and Premium Triggers/Actions). If you use a Developer plan in actual production scenario somehow, your account may be terminated. Make sure to use it only for development purposes. Note that the developer plan has some specific restrictions that the system won't let you do, such as sharing Flows, etc. which will probably make it very hard to use in production anyway - but even if you find a way around it, make sure never to use the free Community plan for production.
For most cases, you might not come close to these limits by the way. For scenarios where you do come to the limits, I recommend capacity add-on, and/or, even a Per-Flow plan add-on depending on the scenario of your Flows.
