Licensing Update: Microsoft PowerApps Portal pricing will be tiered for external users

After announcing PowerApps Portals in June 2019, Microsoft left the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Platform communities waiting until July to find out one of the most important details: the pricing and licensing. And when the approach was revealed, it was met with concern, specifically around the potentially unreasonable costs associated with authenticated users of the portals.

Now, Microsoft has revealed how it will moderate that pricing approach somewhat, offering tiered pricing that will reduce rates as customers buy larger volumes of authenticated user access. Here is the table, published to the Microsoft Docs site and noted recently by alert Microsoft MVP and Portals expert Colin Vermander.

The original pricing model, of charging per login on a monthly basis remains the same. But as the number of logins purchased increases, the price per login decreases from $2 per login for 100 to $1 per login for 1,000, and down to $0.70 for 5,000.

The earlier explanation of pricing did not include the multiple tiers. In his post, Vermander applied one usage scenario involving 10,000 authenticated users to both the earlier single tier and the new multi-tier pricing and found that the tiers will bring overall costs much closer to today's per-portal pricing annually, with some assumptions like the use of dev, test, and production instances.