Last updated: 6 October 2026
Quick Answer: Microsoft Power Automate pricing is fifteen dollars per user per month for Premium and one hundred fifty dollars per bot per month for Process. Both are billed yearly. Microsoft 365 covers cloud flows with standard connectors only, so premium connectors and unattended desktop bots are what create the bill.
Most Power Automate bills come down to one question: which flows touch premium connectors or unattended bots?
Power Automate pricing looks simple on the plan page and stops being simple once a real process is mapped onto it. An approval that reads SharePoint and writes to Teams is covered by licenses you already own. The same approval reading Salesforce is not.
Every figure below is Microsoft's own, read on 6 October 2026. Microsoft calls its plan-page numbers marketing figures, so treat each as a list price; your agreement may differ.
How much does Power Automate cost per user and per bot?
Power Automate costs $15.00 per user per month for Premium, $150.00 per bot per month for Process, $215.00 per bot for Hosted Process and $5,000.00 per tenant for the Process Mining add-on, all billed yearly. Premium is a license a person holds. Process is a license a flow or a bot holds.
| Premium | Process | Hosted Process | Process Mining add-on | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| List price, US dollars per month, billed yearly | 15.00 per user | 150.00 per bot | 215.00 per bot | 5,000.00 per tenant |
| Covers | cloud flows, attended desktop flows, premium and custom connectors, process mining | cloud flows plus unattended desktop flows, one run at a time | as Process, on a Microsoft-hosted VM | process discovery and analysis |
| Requests per 24 hours | 40,000 per user | 250,000 per license | 250,000 per license | not applicable |
Power Automate pricing as listed on microsoft.com on 6 October 2026.
Power Automate pay-as-you-go billing, still marked preview for flow runs, charges $0.60 per premium cloud or attended desktop run, $3.00 per unattended desktop run and $0.01 per Copilot Credit, and excludes standard-connector flows. It suits automation that runs in bursts, not a flow firing every ten minutes.
What does Power Automate Premium add over Microsoft 365?
Premium adds premium and custom connectors, attended desktop flows, process and task mining, and a far larger request allowance.
Microsoft's seeded-license documentation lists premium connectors, custom connectors, attended RPA, unattended RPA and process mining as not included for Microsoft 365, and caps its daily action limit at 6,000 requests per user against 40,000 for a paid one. Power Automate Premium pricing buys all of that, plus 250 MB of Dataverse database capacity against 50 MB per bot license.
Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and Excel are standard connectors; Salesforce, SQL Server, Jira, ServiceNow and anything behind an on-premises gateway are not. One premium connector moves a flow out of seeded rights.
Is Power Automate free with Office 365?
Partly. A Microsoft 365 subscription covers cloud flows with standard connectors at no extra cost. It does not cover premium or custom connectors, desktop flows in either mode, or process mining.
How are unattended RPA bots billed?
Unattended RPA is billed per bot, not per person. A Power Automate Process license lets a flow drive desktop automation with nobody signed in, and each license supports one unattended run at a time, so two simultaneous processes need two licenses. Hosted Process adds a Microsoft-managed Azure virtual machine.
Capacity is the underestimated part. Microsoft puts a Process license at 250,000 Power Platform requests per 24 hours, allows up to ten licenses stacked on one flow, and lets up to 25 solution-aware flows share a flow group's allowance. Child flows do not inherit a parent's capacity, and a five-minute ceiling of 100,000 requests applies whatever the license.
Every tenant is also in a transition period with different interim limits, so read the admin center rather than the published figure.
What does Copilot Studio add to the bill?
Copilot Studio bills in Copilot Credits, a separate currency from Power Automate licenses. Capacity comes as a $200.00 pack of 25,000 Copilot Credits per month or pay-as-you-go, with Microsoft 365 Copilot itself at $30.00 per user per month. Microsoft rates an agent action at 5 credits and agent flow actions at 13 credits per 100 actions.
Microsoft states that Power Automate cloud flows use Power Automate licensing, not Copilot Credits, and are not subject to Copilot Studio billing.
A cloud flow can be converted into an agent flow that draws on Copilot Studio capacity instead, but Microsoft states the conversion is one-way and cannot be reversed.
What happens to AI Builder credits after 1 November 2026?
Premium, Process and the two RPA add-ons each carry 5,000 seeded AI Builder credits today. Microsoft says those seeded credits are removed on 1 November 2026, after which only add-on credits stay active. Existing customers can renew the add-on until then; new customers must buy Copilot Credits instead.
Is Power Automate being phased out?
No. Microsoft still sells Power Automate, and its licensing documentation was updated on 22 September 2026. What has been retired is a short list of specific features, which is where the rumor comes from. Microsoft publishes all of them in one place:
- The Power Automate mobile app, deprecated effective 31 August 2026 and pulled from both app stores. Cloud flows are unaffected; approvals move to Microsoft Teams.
- Export from Microsoft Visio, deprecated effective 14 July 2026. Existing diagrams and flows keep working.
- The Power Automate for Excel add-in from AppSource, replaced by Excel's native Automate tab.
- Personal Microsoft accounts, which can no longer sign in to the portal or manage cloud flows.
- Format data by examples in the classic designer, retired as of August 2025.
- Seeded AI Builder credits, removed on 1 November 2026.
None of these retires the product or affects a flow running in production today.
When does Power Automate stop being the cheaper option?
It stops being cheaper at four predictable points.
- Per-bot cost at scale. Every process needing a simultaneous unattended run is another license, so a dozen concurrent bots is a six-figure annual line before anyone writes a flow.
- Premium connectors across many users. If most of the business touches one non-Microsoft system, Premium becomes an org-wide cost.
- AI steps moving to credits. Once seeded AI Builder credits end, an intelligent flow's cost tracks its volume rather than your headcount.
- Systems outside the Microsoft estate. A long chain of custom-connector calls into a legacy ERP means the integration is the real project.
Past those points the comparison is a licensed platform against a custom agent built for the process or the alternatives to UiPath, where the same per-bot arithmetic applies.
What do teams replace RPA bots with when they move to AI agents?
Teams replacing RPA bots land in one of three places.
Agent platforms. For organizations already standardized on Microsoft, Copilot Studio is the path of least resistance: agents that reason over tenant data and call agent flows for the deterministic steps. Cost moves from licenses to credits, which suits variable volume and punishes constant work.
Automation platforms with agent features. The established RPA and integration vendors have added agent orchestration on top of their bot estates. That is the least disruptive route for a large base of screen-scraping bots, but it keeps the per-bot model.
Custom agents built with an implementation partner. Where a process spans systems no connector reaches, or must run inside a specific network boundary, teams commission the agent rather than license it.
Should a mid-size company choose agentic AI workflows or RPA?
Usually both, in sequence. RPA still wins where a process is stable, high-volume and deterministic, because a bot that never varies is cheaper to run and easier to audit than a model that reasons. Agentic workflows win where inputs are unstructured and the decision is the work. The test is whether a new joiner could do the task from written rules. We compare both in agentic AI versus RPA.
How Origins AI builds agents where Power Automate flows stop
Origins AI (originshq.com) is a US-based AI-augmented engineering company that builds custom AI workflows and agents for product teams. It does not publish a rate card. Its AI services page describes work priced as fixed-cost, milestone-based or subscription, across dedicated teams, project-based, time-and-materials and build-operate-transfer engagements.
The processes it targets are the ones that outgrow a flow. Its agentic automation page lists approval workflows such as purchase orders and access provisioning, triage and routing for tickets and compliance alerts, and monitoring with automated remediation. It sets out four steps:
- Map the process and find the rules-based decisions.
- Set the agent's autonomy boundaries, escalation triggers and approval thresholds.
- Pilot on one process and validate accuracy.
- Scale to further workflows and monitor.
The company reports 1,200 hours saved annually on average, a decision cycle falling from 45 minutes to 3 minutes, 30 to 40 percent of routine decisions automated, and a 3 to 6 month implementation.
Talk to an engineer
If a Power Automate estate is turning into a per-bot renewal, book a call with an engineer with your flow inventory and concurrency requirements.