Employee Kudos Template - Licencing questions

Hello!

I'm aware this has been gone over a fair few times in various forms - but I wanted to ask specifically for this scenario.

We are looking at the potential of using the Employee Kudos template within Power Platform.

For some background our standard licencing across the org is:

Microsoft Power Automate Free
Office 365 E5
Enterprise Mobility + Security E5
Microsoft 365 E5 Extra Features

(among others - but these are the relevant ones)

In the prerequisites it covers licencing (here). When I initially read this, I understood that the only people that would need an explicit Power Apps licence outside of what is provided within Office 365 E5 would be the account that installed the template, and the users that were going to have the Kudos – Program Admin role as that used the Model-driven app to administer - which in our scenario would be 3-5 users.

Now re-reading it and reading online - it seems that because the Power Automate flow that is a part of this uses a Dataverse connector (see here) which will Run as the user that submits the Kudos - each person who we intend to be able to use the Power App will need an explicit Power Apps licence (one of these ones).

I've read the licencing structure / documentation I could find and am still none the wiser...

So my questions are:

Am I correct in thinking that using this application - assuming deployed as documented, will require each individual user of the Power App to have an explicit Power App licence of one of the four types I linked above to allow the use of Premium connectors - and that that capability is not included within our standard licencing set?
If the above is true - would it not be possible to modify the Power Automate flow (see here) to use a Service Account for the Dataverse connector and pass the information of who ran the flow (gleamed from who triggered it the Power App) to wherever it needs to go within Dataverse - effectively bypassing the need to have that connector in the flow be Run As, therefore eliminating the need for the user of the Power App to have an explicit licence?

I'm aware that the #2 question is very specific (and could break any other part of the entire thing) - it's just a theory. It'd be handy to be able to use this pre-built one rather than develop one in-house - but I understand it might not be possible in this way. I very much doubt it's as simple as chopping out/modifying the expensive bit.

I haven't yet deployed this solution to our test environment to try #2 as I'd like to understand the potential licencing costs before spending too much time on it - as you can appreciate this is a much harder sell at the cost of 800~ licences than it is at the cost of 5~!

Any advice is welcomed.

Many thanks!

A

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General Questions

Just to point out, Service Accounts are not intended to be a way to "trick, avoid or in any way not pay" for licenses that are required.

If the user is causing a flow to do something that requires a license then the user needs a license, not just a service account that avoids it.

Access to Dataverse is based on users and users need licenses.

While it is possible, this is a case where you MUST, talk to Microsoft Licensing Employee, or your TAM, or your CAT, or Whomever at your company manages it.

No one here in these forums can tell you what the right way is, and in the end if you listen to people here and its wrong, you aren't going to be able to say Yeah but XXXXXXX from the forums said, so I'm covered!