Hi everyone,
I have a very simple question. As documented by Microsoft, automated flows with premium connectors only need a "per user" licence on the owner of the flow:
Automated and scheduled flows always run in the context of the flow owner regardless of who starts the flow or what accounts are used for connections inside of the flow.
If an automated or scheduled flow uses a premium connector, only the owner needs to have a premium license.
Now the question is, if my flow is deployed using ALM (Using Azure DevOps pipelines and Power Platform Build Tools) the owner of the flow becomes the service principal that was used by the pipeline to deploy the solution, which means there is no physical user on which to assign a license, how are we supposed to licence this flow?
We asked Microsoft and they essentially told us we need to use a "Per Flow" license in this particular case, but to be honest I have a hard time trusting this answer as it makes no sens in terms of cost. Imagine a solution with 5 premium automated flows in it, that solution would cost 19.20$/month when deployed by a regular user, which is roughly 230$/year. That same solution would cost 640$/month when deployed by a service principal (ALM), which is roughly 7680$/year, and this is for one environment. If your ALM strategy includes a DEV and STG environment, you need to add twice that amout which brings us to 23 040$/year, how is that making sens? To recap:
| Solution deployed by |
Flow(s) |
Per user license(s) |
Per flow license(s) |
Total |
| User |
5 |
1 |
0 |
19.20$/mois or
230$/year
|
| Service Principal |
5 |
0 |
5xDEV
5xSTG
5xPRD |
1920$/month
or
23040$/year
|
So we are talking 22000$+/year difference for the same solution, simply because its deployment is automated. Am I missing something here or am I correct?
Thanks!
