Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi everyone,

I'm facing a licensing/execution issue between two accounts in our environment and would appreciate some insight.

The Scenario:

Account A: Has a Power Automate Premium license. This account owns the flow.
Account B (Dev/Standard): Does not have a Power Automate Premium license, only E5 to Power APP.

The Issue:
Account A created a flow using premium connectors (MS SQL). However, when Account B tries to trigger the flow (or even when it's shared with Account B), the flow fails to run or indicates a missing license. Even more confusingly, sometimes the flow won't even trigger for Account A within the Power App context.

What we have tried:

Sharing the flow with "Run-only" permissions.
Checking the connection references.

Question:
How can we ensure that a flow owned by a Premium account (Account A) can be executed by non-premium users (Account B) without requiring every user to have a $15/month license? Is the "Per Flow" license the only way to decouple the runner's license from the owner's license in this case?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Categories:

Building Power Apps

Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

General topics

Hi @DC-16031535-0,

Yes — this is expected behavior. Why it happens - Your flow uses the SQL connector, which is a Premium connector in
Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps.

When a flow is triggered from a Power App, the platform checks the license of the user running the app, not just the flow owner. So:

Account A (Premium) → can create the flow
Account B (no Premium) → cannot run a flow using Premium connectors
Sharing or Run-only permissions does not bypass this

You may try

Give Premium licenses to users who run the app.
Use a Per-Flow license (recommended for shared apps).

The flow itself is licensed
Any user can run it without needing Premium.

About the error in your screenshot

The message about: shared_sql connection reference means the SQL connection reference isn’t properly bound. Ensure the flow uses Account A’s SQL connection, not “Provided by run-only user”.
To let non-premium users run this SQL flow from the app, the clean solution is Power Automate Per-Flow licensing.

I hope this works for you!