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Process license & flow association?

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Posted on by sp.plante

Context

As per microsoft documentation and also confirmed with MS through a support ticket, automated premium flows deployed using pipelines must have a process license. This is because flows deployed using pipelines have no physical owner to which you can assign a "per user" license in the destination environment, since they are owned by the service principal on behalf of which the pipeline has deployed the solution.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/faqs#which-power-automate-licenses-do-i-need

Now at 150$USD/month/flow for a process license, that means a solution with 5 automated premium flows would cost 750$/month just for being deployed by pipeline, because to be clear that same solution would cost 15$USD/month if it was deployed manually and owned by a user with a per-user license.

Flow Associations

As per microsoft documentation again, you should be able to mitigate the pricing above by associating flows that are part of a same process (and part of the same solution) in order to have a single process licence for the whole solution. Note that the documentation is making it very clear that child flows and associated flows are two different things, and both of them should be able to use the same process licence.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/faqs#how-many-power-automate-process-licenses-do-i-need

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/faqs#my-dpa-process-has-multiple-cloud-flows-will-i-need-multiple-process-licenses

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/faqs#we-have-three-environments-development-test-and-production-to-align-with-best-practices-and-we-need-flows-in-several-environments-do-we-need-to-buy-a-process-license-for-every-environment

Even flows detail pages are clearly refering to associated apps AND flows:

The problem

The problem is, it doesn't seem like there is any way to associate flows. The user interface shows exclusively Power Apps, nothing available to associate flows.

While I did not contact Microsoft about this yet, a friend of mine did for the exact same question and Microsoft told him that the process license was only applied to the main flow and child flows, they literally said there was no such thing as associated flows.

To me this is absolute non-sense as it is as clear as day in the documentation, yet Microsoft acts like it doesn't exist, am I crazy?

Anyone got a clear answer on this?

Thanks!

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w.p 8,339 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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FYI: interesting licensing discussion.

https://community.powerplatform.com/forums/thread/details/?threadid=7b006135-8314-f011-998a-6045bdf03fcb

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sp.plante 77 on at

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@w.p Yeah I feel like the "service account" described in your link is more of a "generic account" rather than a "service principal", meaning it is actually a physical user to whom you can assign a regular license.

In my case for a service principal, it is clearly documented that a process license must be used and I also confirmed it with Microsoft which is not an issue on its own, to me it becomes an issue if we can't associate flows like the documentation states.

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DC-09051524-0 4 on at

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I'm in the exact same boat. MS confirmed when we were in license discussions that we'd need to have the Process licenses for our Service Principal owned flows. They also confirmed that we can associate up to 25 additional flows to that Process flow that will be covered. It was my understanding that these did not need to be parent/child flows.

Now we're finally starting to change our flows to be owned by Service Principals and I've discovered there does not seem to be a way to create those flow associations. As per the below documentation "Process allocation to cloud flows and flow association to process flows isn't yet completely available". I haven't been able to find any timelines for when this may become available.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/deep-dive-on-specific-license#power-automate-process-license

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sp.plante 77 on at

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@DC-09051524-0

This new chunk of documentation you posted is VERY interesting.

I was about to close a ticket regarding this issue with Microsoft, I forwarded them the current community post to detail them the exact problem and told them that there was surely a bug :

- Either their documentation (which is clear as water that you can associate flows OTHER than parent/child flows) and UI is all wrong and they need to fix it

- Either their association functionnality exist but doesn't work

In both cases there's a bug on their side. Well it turns out they were ready to close the ticket saying there is no way to associate flows other then parent/child and that they would open a work item on their side to fix the documentation and UI, on which they would follow-up with me the progress on a weekly basis.

I will tell them that based on that new set of information you provided, I can't accept their conclusion and I will ask them to escalate to the product group so someone can figure out if it's a feature in progress or someone literally hallucinated when writing the documentation.

Big thanks to you, I will follow up here with the result of my ticket with Microsoft!

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sp.plante 77 on at

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FYI after challenging Microsoft with the latest documentation posted by @DC-09051524-0 and making it even more obvious that the documentation clearly talks about the possibility of associating cloud flows OTHER than using parent/child flows, the support engineer finally came back to me saying that after internal discussions with the product team, it is indeed possible to associate a process licence to multiple cloud flows, but the feature is on development and they are unable to provide any information in terms of ETA etc...

He did say he will dig deeper to see if he can get any kind of ETA, but it's still really good news as it means that all the documentation is correct and wasn't just randomly "made up" as Microsoft suggested first...I will give some news here if I end up getting an ETA!

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sp.plante 77 on at

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@DC-09051524-0

Well I think I finally got it figured it out with Microsoft. After lots of back and forth with the support engineer and the internal team, here is the recap with the solution:

Currently

The documentation is correct, and we should be able to associate up to 25 cloud flows to a cloud flow that has been assigned a process license

Associating flows is not available yet but it will eventually

Associated flows showing their Plan as "This flow is associated to run on process plan" is not available yet but it will eventually

Meanwhile

Let's say you bought 1 process license that you wish to assign to a solution that has 5 service principal owned premium automated flows

You must first make sure the Allow process capacity overage setting is enabled on your environment (Env/Product/Features/Power Automate capacity)

You must assign a process license to all 5 flows. Here is the tricky part, after you assigned the first flow with the available license, the subsequent assignations will show you a negative amount of available licenses, this is fine as the overage setting above will still let you configure any flow with a process license even though you have none left in the environment.

As per Microsoft, with this example, 4 of the 5 flows will appear as "overage" but organizations can safely ignore overage that could be covered with process association under normal circumstances.

Conclusion

I was super skeptical about this "hacky" solution because based on the documentation, the Allow process capacity overage is meant for allowing process flows to exceed their request limitations (e.g., 250k requests/day), not to allow assigning more process licenses than you have available. However I did some testing and it turns out it does: I tested turning it off and I couldn't configure any flow with a process license anymore, with a clear message saying I had no capacity available. I turned it back on and was able to configure 3 different flows without a problem (other than the message saying -2 licenses available).

But to me what made me a believer is I also found one last bit of documentation that seems to match the solution above from Microsoft:

Deep dive on specific licenses - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

It is under "Power Automate Hosted Process license" rather than "Power Automate Process license", but the hosted process license really just is a superset of the process license which supports hosted machines, it is pretty much the same thing so I don't see why that wouldn't apply for both. So yeah, looks like even the documentation says you can safely ignore process overage that COULD be covered using associations.

Lastly, I made Microsoft confirm that this was a temporary solution to have all your flows running without needed to purchase a ridiculous amount of process licenses. They confirmed you will eventually be able to associate flows as explained in the documentation, that there will not be any overage to deal with in the future.

Have fun :)

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