Are Power Pages licenses too expensive?

Are Power Pages licenses too expensive? I’ve been challenged about the Power Pages costs not once. This is a valid question, and cost optimisation is on top of the priorities of most leaders. So, in this article, I’ll look at whether it’s cheaper to build and run a custom portal to access Dynamics Sales and Service data (Dataverse).

Power Pages pricing listed on Microsoft’s website quotes pricing items for authenticated (logged in) and unauthenticated (not logged in) users, tiered for different volumes (prices are in $ AUD, as of Nov 2023 – with yearly commitment):

Tiers	Minimum requirement	Users/capacity pack	Price/capacity pack
Tier 1	100 users	100	$299.30
Tier 2	10,000 users	100	$112.20
Tier 3	100,000 users	100	$74.80

Let’s take as an example a portal that takes 10,000 monthly active unique users. For these monthly logged-in users, the price will be $11,407.10 – 1 Tier 1 pack ($299.30) and 99 Tier 2 packs ($112.20). This is $136,885.20. Ouch, it seems a lot.

What’s included in Power Pages licenses

With this price, the following is included:

 

• • All the functionality and computing infrastructure of the portal

• • Access to authentication providers

• • Built-in content delivery network support (WAF and CDN)

• • Dataverse storage – 2GB database 16GB storage per 100 users

• • Web API requests* – 200 per user

*) See request limits and allocations.

Entitlement	Inclusion	Cost
Authenticated user license**	10,000 MAUU	$11,407.10
Infrastructure cost (compute/app)	–	included
Security (WAF) and Content Delivery Network (CDN)	–	included
Storage	200 GB records 1.6 TB files	included
Web API requests	2M	included
Total monthly recurring cost	–	$11,407.10

Custom portal – like for like

Now let’s see what running the same on a custom portal application, self-hosted on Azure, would cost. Power Pages architecture is not sophisticated, as explained in Microsoft official documentation:

Of course, it’s a high-level diagram and doesn’t show some essential services you’d need to host it. But you can host something like this for sure. The question is, how much would it cost you for a similar capacity?

This cost estimate is based on matching the same inclusions as the Power Pages licenses option.

Entitlement	Inclusion	Cost
Authenticated user license	n/a	$0
Infrastructure cost (compute/app)*	–	$4,300
Security (WAF) and Content delivery (CDN)	–	included
Storage (via Dataverse Database Capacity add-on $59.90/GB and Dataverse File Capacity add-on $3.00/GB).	200 GB records 1.6 TB files	$16,780
Web API requests (via Power Platform requests add-on $74.80 per 50,000 requests)	2M	$2,992
Total monthly recurring cost	–	$24,072

*) Azure Cost estimates assumptions:

 

• • Pay-as-you-go pricing.

• • 8 v-core 32GB RAM 250GB storage for Production App Service plan.

• • 2 x 4 v-core 7GB RAM 50GB storage for Dev and Test App Service plans.

• • 1M web requests per month with 50GB of FrontDoor traffic.

• • 5 developer licenses and a Free tier with premium Azure DevOps licenses.

• • 1TB storage with 1M write operations per month.

Wow, now it’s twice as much as the power pages licenses! Now, the original $11,407.10 per month seems like a good deal.

Of course, you may not need 200 GB records 1.6 TB file storage, and 2M requests for 10,000 active users. You can fine-tune the infrastructure size and bring it down to a price tag similar to Power Pages! It doesn’t make it beneficial or even on par with the custom portal option as you still have to pay for the following:

 

• • The development cost of the custom portal application – everything from input controls, grids, forms, pages, etc. This can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars of software engineering, depending on the size of your portal.

• • Infrastructure management – deployment, scaling, fixing, etc. With managed services like Azure Web App, it’s easier than VMs, but still, you need a cloud engineer to keep an eye on everything running 24/7.

Takeaways

In summary, as long as you need to access Dataverse data and don’t cannibalise your paid Dynamics 365 Sales and Service inclusions, the custom portal case doesn’t stack. The answer to the original question, “Are Power Pages licenses too expensive?” is No, they are not, as the value included would be difficult to match better. This is even more so for unauthenticated users (as licenses are cheaper).