Power Automate licensing trips up a lot of Australian mid-market teams, and the confusion is usually expensive in one direction or the other. Either you over-buy per-user Premium seats for a workflow that only needed a single flow licence, or you under-scope and discover halfway through a build that unattended RPA needs a different plan entirely. This is a plain-English breakdown of the three commercial models Microsoft sells in 2026, in AUD ex GST, and the practical point where one beats another.
The three licensing models, in one breath
Power Automate has settled into three commercial shapes. Premium is licensed per user. Process (the per-flow plan) is licensed per flow. Hosted Process is the per-flow plan plus a Microsoft-run machine to execute it. Everything else — AI Builder credits, pay-as-you-go metering, the basic flows bundled into Microsoft 365 — sits around the edges of those three.
- Power Automate Premium — per user, around AUD $22.70 per user / month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase). Unlocks premium connectors, attended desktop RPA and AI Builder for that named person.
- Power Automate Process — per flow, around AUD $225 per flow / month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase). Licenses one flow to run for unlimited users, including unattended.
- Power Automate Hosted Process — per flow with a Microsoft-hosted machine, around AUD $325 per bot / month, billed annually (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase; this maps to the USD $215 plan).
What the Microsoft 365 bundle already covers
Before paying for anything, work out whether you need to. Most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans include the right to build cloud flows using standard connectors. If your automation only shuffles data between SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Planner, Excel Online and Dataverse-for-Teams using those standard connectors, you can often run it on licensing you already own.
The line you cross into paid territory is specific. You need a paid licence the moment a flow uses a premium connector (most third-party SaaS, custom connectors, the HTTP action, the on-premises data gateway), automates a desktop app via RPA, or calls AI Builder. Knowing exactly which connectors a flow uses is the single most useful piece of homework before any pricing conversation.
Premium: per user, and how it actually gets counted
Premium is the licence most Australian businesses reach for first because it is simple to buy: one seat per person, monthly, with a better annual rate. At roughly AUD $22.70 per user / month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase), it gives that named user unlimited cloud flows with premium connectors, attended desktop RPA on their own machine, and a slice of AI Builder.
The catch is in how Microsoft expects you to count it. Premium is licensed per user who is covered by the flows, not per user who built them. If you build one approval flow that 40 staff trigger, the strict licensing position is 40 Premium seats — and at that scale the per-user model gets pricey fast. That is precisely the situation the per-flow plan exists to solve.
Process: per flow, for shared and unattended work
The Process plan flips the unit of pricing from people to the flow itself. One Process licence covers a single flow that can run for unlimited users, and critically it can run unattended — automatically, on a schedule or trigger, with no one signed in. At around AUD $225 per flow / month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase), it is a flat cost regardless of how many staff the automation touches.
This is the right shape for organisation-wide processes: an invoice-routing flow, a starter/leaver provisioning workflow, a nightly data sync. You are paying for the workload, not the audience. The trade-off is that you license each such flow separately, so a sprawl of twenty small automations can add up — consolidation and good flow design directly reduce the bill.
Hosted Process: per flow, plus a machine you don't manage
Unattended desktop RPA needs a machine that is always on, signed in and patched. You can supply that yourself — a VM in your tenant or a physical box in a cupboard — under a standard Process licence. Or you can take the Hosted Process plan, around AUD $325 per bot / month billed annually (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase; the USD $215 plan), where Microsoft runs the machine for you.
The honest comparison here is not just licence versus licence. A self-hosted RPA machine carries real hidden cost: the VM compute, the OS patching, the credential management, and the 2am incident when an unattended bot stalls because Windows decided to update. Hosted Process folds that operational burden into the per-bot price. For teams running one or two unattended bots without a platform team to babysit infrastructure, the premium is often worth it.
The crossover: when shared flows beat per-user
Here is the rule of thumb that matters most. A shared, well-defined automation starts to beat per-user Premium once it serves more than roughly ten people. Below that, a handful of Premium seats is cheaper and simpler. Above it, the flat per-flow cost wins and keeps winning as headcount grows.
Work a quick example at indicative list prices. A flow used by 30 staff under Premium is 30 seats at ~AUD $22.70 — about AUD $681 / month. The same flow under a single Process licence is ~AUD $225 / month flat. The Process plan is roughly a third of the cost and does not grow when you add the 31st user. Reverse it for a flow only three people use, and three Premium seats (~AUD $68 / month) easily beat a Process licence — and those three users get premium rights across all their own flows as a bonus.
What we'd actually do
In practice we start every Power Automate licensing decision with an inventory, not a price list. List each automation, note who it serves, mark whether it needs premium connectors, attended RPA or unattended RPA, and estimate the covered user count. That single table answers almost every licensing question before you talk to a reseller.
- Flows for a small number of power users, standard connectors only — stay on the Microsoft 365 bundle; pay for nothing.
- Premium-connector flows used by a few people each — buy those people Premium seats; they're covered across all their flows.
- One automation serving a dozen-plus staff — license it as a Process flow and stop counting heads.
- Unattended desktop RPA without a platform team — take Hosted Process and let Microsoft own the machine.
- Twenty trivial automations duplicating logic — consolidate first; every Process flow you avoid is ~AUD $225 / month back.
The mistake we see most often is buying Premium seats by reflex because it is the easiest SKU to understand, then quietly over-paying for years on a workflow that one Process licence would have covered. The second most common is the reverse — scoping a clever unattended bot without realising it needs Process or Hosted Process, and the project stalling at go-live. A ten-minute inventory up front avoids both, and gives you defensible AUD numbers to take to whoever signs the annual commitment.