So much confusion on AI Builder Licensing

[RameshMukka]

I have gone through several blog posts including Microsoft and other MVPs about AI Builder licensing and it still confuses me a lot. I really dont understand how consumption of service credit is measured. Can anyone tell me what could be my cost if below is my business case.

I have 5000 invoices to process every month. I got to extract Invoice Date, Vendor Name and Invoice Number from those invoices using AI Builder Forms Processing. What could be my cost here? I also see AI builder license calculator too confusing for me with some many options there. Also am using AI Builder connectors in Power Automate to get those values back to SharePoint when users upload invoices to SharePoint document library. Does all those users also got to have additional licenses here. They already E5 standard licenses assigned. Please someone enlighten me on this licensing.

[CedrickB · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You can try out the recently released Invoice Processing model (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/prebuilt-invoice-processing) which is currently in public preview, so free (futur price will be similar to the Form Processing model)

If not all your documents are properly processed, you can train a custom one providing samples of your documents with Form Processing (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/form-processing-model-overview)

According to the calculator, you would need 4 addons using these type of models so $2k/month.

We take a small buffer in the evaluation to ensure customers are not running short of credits so I believe 3 should be enough in your case.

You will also need at least 1 Power Automate license to orchestrate your processing and use the AI Builder connectos but this should be included in your E5 license.

Once you have allocated the credits in the Power Platform Admin Center (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/get-started-with-ai-builder-licensing/4-manage-capaci...), you will be able to monitor your usage (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/administer-consumption-report)

You can find a summary of AI Builder licensing in this page (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/administer-licensing) 

[RameshMukka]

@CedrickB Thank you for responding here.

1. What is the difference between Invoice Processing (Preview) and AI Builder Forms Processing? How long this going to be in preview to use for free? 
2. Does the 1500 USD you mentioned also includes extracting as many number as values for forms?
3. In a given month, if we are processing only 1000 documents then are we charged accordingly?

Thanks,

Ramesh

[CedrickB]

1. Invoice Processing comes with default fields extracted as you can see in the documentation link provided above. 

It means the model will look for keys that are likely to be "Amount due", "Billing address", "Customer name", ...

But it may happen that the model is not able to find it automatically.

In that situation, using Form Processing will allow you build a custom model where you will draw nouding boxes on the fields you are interrested in during the training phase.

2. There is no limitation in the number of fields extracted, at least not that customers have encountered so far.

We are not charging per number of fields extracted but per page.

So if you have 100 fields in a single page it will only count as one page.

3. AI Builder is a subscription based model so you are charged on a fix amount each month even if you are not using all your credits.

[PiperDan]

Sorry to say, but the AI Robot is WAAAAAAAAY too expensive and not worth the money for small business.  There is no way my clients would pay $500++ a month to save a few hours a week.  I tried it out with Taxation documents for an accounting firm, extracting information, renaming files, just simple stuff and thought I might be able to get away with the Per User licensing with 5000 credits.  Was not to be.

Might be value for money for large business but certainly not for small business.

[Paulow1978]

This is an absolute joke Microsoft. $500 a month!!! I was trialling the workflow in this link:

Use the invoice processing prebuilt model in Power Automate - AI Builder | Microsoft Learn

I only needed it to process 20 invoices a month as an experiment. This completely prices out SMB's at this rate.

Who on earth came up with the pricing model for this???!!!

[takolota]

@RameshMukka @Paulow1978 @PiperDan @CedrickB 

So I built this template that processes any document just using the less expensive image recognition AI Builder service & GPT.

It seems much less expensive with a much lower barrier to entry only requiring a premium Power Automate license with 5000 AI Builder credits per month & some on-going LLM / GPT costs…

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Extract-Data-From-PDFs-and-Images-With-G...

If I’m looking at this right, this method should cost 

Image recognition +.0017

GPT prompt & output +.007

Flow actions +.00375

So about $ .013 per page.

Less expensive than any of the other microsoft document/receipt/invoice processing options. And several of those take about 30 seconds to run. 
And the 5000 AI Builder credits that come with the now $15 premium Power Automate license is enough for 1500 Image recognition pages. So you could probably process 500-750 documents per month with just 1 premium Power Automate license.

So it seems this method is faster, less expensive, easier to adjust, & requires less set-up than other standard AI builder set-ups.

Once the GPT actions are in general availability, I don’t know why I’d use any of the other services. 🤷‍

[CedrickB]

Some clarification:

- AI Builder price per page with entry tier is $0.05 per page which is aligned with the market (not to say cheaper)

- Though, it is true that the minimum purchase, ($500 AI Builder addon entitling 1M credits=10K pages per month)  may not be suitable for companies with small volume scenarios.

- I remind you that AI Builder credits are included with Power Apps per app (250 credits per license=2.5 pages per month), Power Apps per user (500 credits per license per month=5 pages), Power Automate with RPA (5,000 credits per license=50 pages per month). So if you already have a couple of those licenses you may be good to go.

[DeeBrown]

This tool is so expensive that it does not make any sense for my organization to use it.
Too bad I already spent some time building my workflow... I just never expected it to be this expensive.