Power Automate Pricing: Price the Person, Process, and Machine

“How much does Power Automate cost?” has no useful single answer until you identify who builds the flow and whether it runs with a person or without one. Microsoft lists prices for a named user, an unattended process, and a hosted unattended process. A team budget must map those units to an actual workflow, plus any services that the flow uses.

The three headline prices

On Microsoft’s US pricing page, checked October 5, 2026, Power Automate Premium is listed at $15 per user per month, Process at $150 per bot per month, and Hosted Process at $215 per bot per month, all billed annually. Microsoft says actual prices vary by country, currency, and contract. Treat these as list prices for comparison, not a quote for your tenant.

Premium licenses a named person for building and running cloud flows and attended desktop automation. “Attended” means a person starts or supervises the desktop action. Process is capacity for a flow or unattended desktop automation; “unattended” means it can run without a person at the machine. Hosted Process adds a Microsoft-hosted virtual machine for that unattended work. Microsoft’s license guide explains allocation and limits; review it for the exact flow you plan to run.

A small budget example

Suppose eight named staff need Premium and one unattended process needs Process capacity. At those published US list prices, the license line is 8 × $15 + $150 = $270 a month, before tax and any other products or infrastructure. If that unattended desktop process needs Microsoft-hosted capacity instead, the illustrative line becomes 8 × $15 + $215 = $335 a month. This is arithmetic from list prices, not a customer bill or a claim that every deployment needs eight Premium users.

Do not multiply every process by every employee. Also do not assume a Process license replaces every builder’s or operator’s user entitlement. Identify the flow owner, the people who edit it, the run identity, premium connectors, data storage, and any additional licensing for connected systems. Microsoft’s licensing FAQ is the place to verify edge cases before procurement.

Consider an illustrative accounts-payable team. The sponsor buys one unattended process to move invoice fields into a system, but the desktop layout changes and the flow starts putting amounts in the wrong records. The monthly license bill is still predictable; the correction work is not. For a two-week controlled run, the owner can require every payment-related field to match the source before approval, log every exception, and pause unattended posting after a single material mismatch. Those are example gates, not Microsoft service guarantees.

In that example, “material” means the supplier, amount, bank destination, or approval status differs from the source document. The team can let a human correct a harmless formatting difference; it should pause automated posting for a wrong payee or amount. That distinction gives the reviewer an action to take, rather than a vague error percentage.

Price the work, not only the bot

Choose one process and tally monthly completed cases, failures, human review minutes, and support time. Include implementation, monitoring, and repair. A desktop automation that saves five minutes on a successful run can still disappoint if frequent screen changes force rework. Compare cost per accepted case with the current process, and give the owner a stop rule for errors that change a customer record or payment.

The decision

If the work happens while a named person is present, model Premium for those people first. If it must run without a person, map the flow or machine to Process and verify the builders’ own entitlements. If an unattended desktop run also needs Microsoft-hosted machine capacity, price Hosted Process. Confirm the allocation in your tenant and request a contract quote. Then take the measured failure and review work to the AI pilot scorecard; a license choice is only one line in the rollout decision.

Useful next steps

• Build a finance-ready AI business case — Include operating and review cost beyond licenses.
• Use the AI pilot scorecard — Check whether automated work is accepted.