New PowerApps and Flow Licensing coming October 1, 2019

[Pstork1]

If you haven't seen the announcement yet about the Licensing changes that are coming to PowerApps and Flow starting on October 1, 2019 you really need to read the following Blog. This announcement was originally made at Inspire this year, but has undergone a number of significant changes.  Make sure you read this and understand what it means to you and your organization.

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-licensing-options-for-powerapps-and-flow/

[pulsebeat]

Maybe this should be another thread but....like most (all?) of you, I am forced to leave Powerapps (can't go from $0 to $300,000/year).  So what are the alternatives you are all looking at?    

[JohnP]

@pulsebeat 

We're still in denial. Flabbergasted. But clearly we have to look at alternatives down the road during the "grandfather period" which MS "graciously" offers us (terms still to be negotiated, thank you).

https://www.mendix.com/resources/gartner-2019-magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-low-code-application-pla...

[FredericForest]

Something that gets to me with this whole thing is that MS (or that part of MS at least) seems to be confusing PaaS and SaaS.

Sometimes, our business is willing to pay 10$/month/user for a fully-featured, top quality, key-in-hand piece of software that solves a non-mission-critical problem. We came accross Sql Database Modeler two weeks ago and it was just the case: It was a bit of unexpected spending, but we felt it was worth our money.

But PowerApps is a platform. You still have to build (and support/maintain) the **bleep** things. ^^ And no matter how talended I am, it's not going to be to the level of a real SaaS offering since, for one, I am not a team of full-time developper dedicated to a subject.

THAT, more than anything, is where I feel PowerApps (Dynamics flavoured) is going wrong : it's a middleware platform asking for a final product pricing scheme. No power user can convince their boss to grant them license money AND spend days building something. "Can't you find something on the market that does more or less what you want" I hear them say (real SaaS approach). "Can't you just do an Excel spreadsheet like we do for everything else?" (real platform approach).

We as professionals have often been the silent, under-the-radar evangilazors of MS solutions, but now we are cut out from our typical usecase and can't help propagate the solution.

The only opportunties left is when corporate buyers and sellers agree on a massive deployment and someone at IT realises "well, now that we're paying for this thing I've never heard about, i guess I need to find some use for it".

Because lets face it : despite its potential, PowerApps is still largely unheard of. For most folks, there are still quite a few steps in that AIDA model before a purchase. Now the whole buttom-up approach is dead, and the top-down one will fail to takeoff without strong community support from power users and consultants.

This is truly a sad and terrible mistake. 😞

[OneThing]

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@FredericForest wrote:

Something that gets to me with this whole thing is that MS (or that part of MS at least) seems to be confusing PaaS and SaaS.

Sometimes, our business is willing to pay 10$/month/user for a fully-featured, top quality, key-in-hand piece of software that solves a non-mission-critical problem. We came accross Sql Database Modeler two weeks ago and it was just the case: It was a bit of unexpected spending, but we felt it was worth our money.

But PowerApps is a platform. You still have to build (and support/maintain) the **bleep** things. ^^ And no matter how talended I am, it's not going to be to the level of a real SaaS offering since, for one, I am not a team of full-time developper dedicated to a subject.

THAT, more than anything, is where I feel PowerApps (Dynamics flavoured) is going wrong : it's a middleware platform asking for a final product pricing scheme. No power user can convince their boss to grant them license money AND spend days building something. "Can't you find something on the market that does more or less what you want" I hear them say (real SaaS approach). "Can't you just do an Excel spreadsheet like we do for everything else?" (real platform approach).

We as professionals have often been the silent, under-the-radar evangilazors of MS solutions, but now we are cut out from our typical usecase and can't help propagate the solution.

The only opportunties left is when corporate buyers and sellers agree on a massive deployment and someone at IT realises "well, now that we're paying for this thing I've never heard about, i guess I need to find some use for it".

Because lets face it : despite its potential, PowerApps is still largely unheard of. For most folks, there are still quite a few steps in that AIDA model before a purchase. Now the whole buttom-up approach is dead, and the top-down one will fail to takeoff without strong community support from power users and consultants.

This is truly a sad and terrible mistake. 😞

---

I agree wholeheartedly. We use power apps for simple things such as Training booking calendars, HR Campaign Trackers and Photo ID badge creation. For the new licensing costs we can buy a dedicated, more feature rich Service to replace all of our in house built systems and still have enough money left over to have a company day out.

Can you imagine if Microsoft decided to licence VB, C or other Visual studio language components the same way? I know you've bought visual studio for all your developers and the hardware to run the apps and created the SQL databases, but now you will need to pay a monthly subscription to use the connection between these servers as well...

I'm more disappointed than anything else tbh, I've campaigned for powerapps use with great initial resistance, and now the company is bought in and starting to see some of the benefits, its being taken away due to crazy licencing costs.

[sscarcella]

5 yr grace period???  but who is going to use something they already know is outdated knowing they need something else 5 years from now.  I have already dumped my powerapps.

[wjhepworth]

Well, in terms of being outdated, not sure the the PowerApps platform can be classified that way.  While none of us are happy about the pricing, it is still a great platform.  If it weren't, nobody here would care.

[rorybi]

Hey @PaulD1 ,

Did you hear that there are grandfathering arrangemends for 5 years for existing apps and flows?

[rorybi]

Good comments Fred - I think that the licensing offered really is unfit for large organisations - they are going to have to do a lot better to deal with this audience.

[FredericForest]

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@rorybi wrote:

Good comments Fred - I think that the licensing offered really is unfit for large organisations - they are going to have to do a lot better to deal with this audience.

---

Funny thing is : small organisations feel exactly the same . I deal with both SMB and multinational enterprises, and I've yet to hear someone say it's a great value proposition...

[KC]

It's still too early to tell and I'm still trying to wrap my head around all this like many others.

I have no idea what my employer will or won't do in regards to the new licensing just yet.

I have no involvment in the decision making in regards to licensing.

I have been a PowerApps Champion in my organization for almost two years now and based on my reccomendations, posts, and tutorials, other departments have or are starting to develop with the PowerApp platform as well.

I will still reccomend PowerApps for SharePoint list forms but with this new licensing it will be a hard sell on other types of app development.

Based on my past experience I suspect within our organization that PowerApps will now be restricted to SharePoint list forms only as replacement for InfoPath.

The majority of the mobile versions of PowerApps will most likely be eliminated.

I will need to refactor, I mean port over to another platform, all PowerApps that rely on connectors.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not abandoning the platform, but I forsee that more than likely I will be developing with PowerApps much less due to these license changes.

Going forward, since I've also been developing internal department apps with REACT, Angular and .NET for several years now,

If there is any fallout, and there will be, from the new PowerApps licensing, I'll just start developing more web and SharePoint apps with Angular, REACT and .NET 

Not yet sure about Flow, but given that the majority of apps I develop have to be made available to all employees worldwide. The number of employees could be over a 100,000 contractors, fulltime and temporary workers at any given time, Flow will be restricted as well. 

As for developing mobile apps, I can always get back up to speed on SWIFT if need be. We are an iOS only house.

PowerApps is a wonderful platform to develop with, it has been a pleasure working in this environment.

I truly believe there is no easier nor faster way to develop and that you Microsoft should be able to make money from it.

But I also agree with everyone else on this forum that this is too drastic a change.

My department and I suspect our other deparments will follow, All PowerApps projects that require connectors, that require data sources other than SharePoint will be terminated and evaluated to see if we wish to port to another platform or just shelved, which is a shame.