Power Automate

More than many teams expect, as long as the apps are on the standard list. The license types page says basic Power Automate use is included at no cost for work or school accounts in a Microsoft Entra tenant: you can create and run cloud flows without sharing them and run desktop flows locally. Office 365 business and enterprise plans include automated, scheduled and button flows. Both are limited to standard connectors. The standard connector list includes Teams, SharePoint, Excel Online, Outlook.com, Gmail, Google Sheets, Slack, Trello and Asana; Salesforce and HubSpot are not on it.

Windows 11 users can also try attended desktop flows for personal use in the default environment, but that right does not include cloud flows. If most of your apps sit outside Microsoft 365, the Zapier profile shows how a task-based service prices the same kind of trigger and action.

Anyone whose flow uses a premium or custom connector, but how many people depends on the flow type. The licensing FAQ says automated and scheduled flows run in the owner’s context, so only the owner needs Premium. Instant flows run as the person who presses the button, so every user needs Premium, unless you give the flow a Process licence instead.

Process ($150 per bot a month on the pricing page) is the licence for unattended RPA on a machine and for business processes that should not depend on a person’s licence. Hosted Process ($215) adds a Microsoft-managed virtual machine. The old per-flow plan left the price list in February 2024; existing per-flow licences keep working but cannot be stacked.

Every trigger and every action that runs is one request, and the request limits page includes built-in steps such as initialising a variable or a compose action, failed actions, retries and pagination. A flow with one trigger and one action uses two requests per run, and actions inside a loop count once per item. Desktop flow executions do not consume requests.

The 24-hour limits are 6,000 per user on Free and Microsoft 365, 40,000 per user on Premium and 250,000 per Process licence, with a separate ceiling of 100,000 requests in any five minutes. All tenants are in a transition period in which Premium and seeded limits apply per flow (200,000 for Premium, 10,000 for Microsoft 365); Microsoft says to design for the per-user limits that follow. A flow that is throttled continuously is turned off, and the fix Microsoft recommends is a Process licence on that flow.

Not the request allowance. The AI Builder credit page says AI Builder actions, including prompts, consume AI Builder credits, and adding one does not make a flow premium. Microsoft 365 licences include no AI Builder capacity. Premium has carried 5,000 seeded credits per licence, but Microsoft removes seeded credits on 1 November 2026, and new customers can no longer buy the AI Builder add-on: they buy Copilot Credits. When AI Builder credits run out, flows fall back to Copilot Credits, and if none are available the AI actions fail.

Prompt cost depends on input and output tokens and the model. The prompt tokens page notes a hidden Microsoft system prompt of roughly 1,200 tokens on each run, and testing a prompt in the builder is free.

The limits page caps a run at 30 days, including time waiting for an approval, and keeps run history for 30 days. A flow whose trigger or actions fail continuously for 14 days is turned off. A flow not triggered for 90 days may be turned off too, unless its owner has a premium or capacity licence, with a warning 30 days before. On the Low performance profile used by Free and Microsoft 365, an Apply to each loop handles at most 5,000 items and failed actions get up to two retries.

1. Sign in with a work account, create an automated flow triggered by a new Microsoft Forms response, add a condition that sends empty messages to a review sheet, then an Excel row and a Teams message.
2. Submit ten test responses, including two with an empty message, and open each run in the run history.
3. Open the flow’s Analytics, Actions tab, and confirm the requests per run match the trigger, condition and actions that ran.
4. Add a Salesforce action and note whether the designer asks for a Premium licence.
5. Ask your admin how many AI Builder or Copilot Credits the environment has before adding an AI prompt step.

Accept if the request count matches the steps, empty responses follow the branch you set and the licence prompt appears only at the premium step. Reject if the flow needs Premium for apps you thought were standard, or no AI credits are allocated to the environment. No result is recorded here.