How much does Power Automate cost in 2026?
Quick Answer: Power Automate Premium costs $15/user/month for cloud flows with premium connectors. Adding desktop RPA costs $40/user/month. Unattended RPA bots are $150/bot/month. Some features are included free with Microsoft 365 E3/E5 licenses as of March 2026.
Pricing Overview
Microsoft Power Automate uses a licensing model that varies based on whether automation is per-user or per-flow, and whether it includes desktop RPA capabilities. Many organizations already have partial Power Automate access through existing Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which complicates the pricing picture.
Power Automate Pricing Tiers (as of March 2026)
| Tier | Price | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Power Automate Premium | $15/user/mo | Cloud flows, standard + premium connectors, Dataverse, Process Mining |
| Power Automate Premium with RPA | $40/user/mo | All Premium features + attended desktop RPA, AI Builder credits |
| Power Automate Process | $150/bot/mo | Unattended RPA, hosted machine groups, cloud flows per bot |
| Per Flow (legacy) | ~$500/flow/mo | 5 flows minimum, unlimited users per flow |
What Each Plan Includes
Power Automate Premium ($15/user/mo)
The Premium plan provides access to cloud-based automation with both standard connectors (SharePoint, Outlook, Teams) and premium connectors (Salesforce, SAP, Oracle). It includes Dataverse database storage (250 MB per user), Process Mining capabilities, and 5,000 AI Builder credits per month. This tier is the entry point for organizations that need to connect to non-Microsoft services.
Power Automate Premium with RPA ($40/user/mo)
This tier adds attended desktop RPA via Power Automate Desktop. Users can record and replay desktop interactions for legacy applications that lack APIs. It includes additional AI Builder credits and attended robot functionality. This plan is commonly used in industries where employees interact with legacy Windows applications.
Power Automate Process ($150/bot/mo)
The Process plan provides unattended RPA capabilities where bots run on virtual machines or hosted machine groups without human interaction. Each Process license includes cloud flows scoped to the bot. This tier is used for high-volume, repetitive tasks like invoice processing, data migration, and batch reporting.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
- M365 included features are limited: Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 licenses include Power Automate for Microsoft 365, but this only covers standard connectors. Any flow using a premium connector (Salesforce, SAP, custom connectors) requires a separate Power Automate Premium license at $15/user/month.
- Dataverse storage: The 250 MB per user Dataverse allocation fills up quickly for data-intensive workflows. Additional Dataverse storage costs approximately $40 per GB per month, and exceeding the allocation can cause flows to fail.
- AI Builder credits: The included 5,000 AI Builder credits per month are shared across the tenant, not per user. Organizations using document processing, text recognition, or prediction models may exhaust credits quickly and need to purchase additional capacity at approximately $500 per 1 million credits.
How Power Automate Pricing Compares
Power Automate's pricing is competitive for organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Zapier starts at $29.99/month but does not include RPA capabilities. Make at $10.59/month offers more operations per dollar for pure cloud automation. UiPath attended robots cost approximately $420/user/year ($35/user/month), making Power Automate's $40/user/month RPA tier slightly more expensive than UiPath for attended use cases. The key differentiator is that Power Automate is the only platform that natively integrates with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure without requiring premium connectors.
Editor's Note: We deployed Power Automate for a 200-person financial services firm already on Microsoft 365 E3. The M365 license covered standard connector flows at no additional cost. When the team needed Salesforce integration, 15 users required Premium licenses at $15/user/month ($225/month). They later added 3 unattended RPA bots for invoice processing at $150/bot/month ($450/month). Total incremental cost: $675/month on top of existing M365 licensing. The invoice processing bots handled 2,400 invoices per month that previously required 1.5 FTEs ($90,000/year). ROI payback was under 3 months. The main surprise was Dataverse storage — they hit the 250 MB limit within 6 weeks and needed an additional 5 GB at $200/month.
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