How can you charge for anonymous access?

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Posted on by Simon7101

Maybe I'm losing the plot but how can you charge for anonymous web access?

Ok, I start small but within 6 months I produce some content that is viewed 1 million times.

I simply don't understand how Microsoft can license anonymous visitors to a website.

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oliver.rodrigues 9,368 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi Simon, please check this FAQ as I think it can help you: Power Platform licensing FAQs - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

Microsoft will count the number of visitors through cookies/sessions

Overall, you will assign capacity and you will be able to monitor the activity in your website

If you feel like you need more capacity, you will be able to purchase more packs

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Simon7101 6 on at

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Hi Oliver,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. However, the information you have provided I'm already aware of and it doesn't answer my question.

I simply don't understand how Microsoft can charge for anonymous web browsing. You're basically putting everything behind a pay wall.

What happens if I want to offer a questions / answers forum such as the platform we're communicating on now. The forum could see millions of views each month. Based on those numbers we would need to pay 50,000 usd a month for anonymous access only!!! Are you trying to tell me that somehow relecfts the cost of serving these pages from another platform, virtual environment or even physical environment?

It just doesn't make sense.

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oliver.rodrigues 9,368 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Well.. in your example it's not we (as forum members) who would have to pay for anything, it would be Microsoft (or let's say the "Power Pages organisation") who would have to pay for us to use the forum.

Power Pages allows organisations to create websites exposing dataverse data. Behind the scenes there is an Azure web app plus a whole product team working on the product, it shouldn't really be free.

I personally think it should be cheaper, and maybe not per user, but maybe a static fee, I don't know. But I don't think it should be free either.

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Simon7101 6 on at

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Hi Oliver,

I agree with you that it shouldn't be free to the business. But the licensing model of charging for anonymous access is simple wrong. And even the authenticated user model is way over priced.

Obviously the forum example I used was to highlight the business costs for anything from a small business to large. And I understand that anonymous browsers won't have a direct cost.

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Fubar 8,338 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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So if you are running up your own servers to host you will often have charges for:
In bound traffic (irrespective of anonymous or authenticated)
Out bound traffic (irrespective of anonymous or authenticated)
Storage costs HDD/SSD etc
Server RAM
Intrusion detection at the hosting level etc
Add extra for Enterprise grade hardware
Charged for the Virtual machine (may include some of the traffic. storage etc aetc bove up to a certain volume)
Often with license fees for software depending on your stack (in our case its a MSFT stack, so pretty much everything would have a licencing requirement)
Hence why there is a charge for Anonymous access, as it consumes resources - you can argue that it is too expensive etc (but not that it shouldn't have a charge)

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Simon7101 6 on at

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Hi Fubar,

Thanks for joining the conversation.

If I was going old school then many of the points you've made are valid. However, to serve a million visitors per month I still don't think this would cost 50,000 dollars per month as it would for Power Pages.

Furthermore, if you use Microsofts very own Azure Web Apps it certainly doesn't cost 50,000 dollars per month!

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