Do I pay for Power Pages per site or per tenant?

Per site. Power Pages authenticated and anonymous capacity packs are assigned to an individual website, not pooled across your tenant. If you run multiple Power Pages sites you size and pay for each one separately, which is why consolidating audiences onto fewer sites is one of the easiest ways to reduce the bill. The Dataverse storage that comes bundled with each pack does accrue to the tenant overall.

What's the difference between authenticated and anonymous Power Pages users?

Authenticated users log in through an identity provider before using the site; anonymous users browse without signing in. You license them separately, and authenticated capacity is far more expensive per head — indicatively around AUD $300 per 100 authenticated users versus around AUD $115 per 500 anonymous users per site per month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase). Pushing non-sensitive content to the anonymous tier is a legitimate way to lower cost.

Is it cheaper to build my portal in Power Apps instead of Power Pages?

Only if the audience is small and internal. Power Apps Premium is roughly AUD $29.90 per user per month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase), which is fine for staff but ruinous for a large external audience — 1,500 external users would be over AUD $44,000 a month as named Power Apps licences versus a few thousand on Power Pages capacity packs. For external-facing portals, Power Pages almost always wins; for internal tools, Power Apps usually does.

Do my own employees need a Power Pages licence to use a portal?

Usually not. An employee with a Power Apps per-user or Dynamics 365 enterprise licence already has use rights to access Power Pages websites — per-user grants unlimited site access. Power Pages capacity packs are really designed for external users who hold no Microsoft licence. So model your staff under their existing licences and reserve Power Pages packs for your external audience.

Power Pages Pricing vs Power Apps (Australia 2026)

If you need an external-facing portal — a customer self-service hub, a grant or membership site, a contractor onboarding page — you will eventually land on a fork in the road inside the Microsoft Power Platform. Do you build it as a Power Pages site and pay for it by the number of people who visit each month, or do you build a portal-style experience in Power Apps and pay per user? The two licensing models look superficially similar, but they bill on completely different axes, and choosing the wrong one can quietly double your annual cost. This guide lays out the numbers in plain English, in indicative Australian dollars ex GST, so you can size it before you commit.

The core difference: who you're licensing

Power Apps is built for internal users — your own staff, each of whom holds a named licence and signs in with a work account. Power Pages is built for external users — customers, members, ratepayers, applicants — who you do not want to (and legally often cannot) issue a Microsoft 365 licence to. That single distinction drives the whole pricing conversation. If your portal is for employees behind your own tenant, Power Apps is usually the natural home. If it's for the public or for people outside your organisation, Power Pages exists precisely so you're not buying thousands of per-user licences.

Power Pages also splits its external audience into two categories that you license separately: authenticated users (people who log in through an identity provider) and anonymous users (people who browse without signing in). You buy capacity for each, per website, per month. That per-site, per-month framing is the part most teams miss when they first model the cost.

Power Pages capacity packs, in indicative AUD

Microsoft sells Power Pages in capacity packs scoped to a single website. The published US list prices as of 2026 are around USD $200 for a pack of 100 authenticated users per site per month, and around USD $75 for a pack of 500 anonymous users per site per month. Converted at a rough working rate, that lands near the figures below — treat these as indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase, because Microsoft bills these in USD and your effective price moves with the exchange rate and any partner agreement.

Authenticated users: ~AUD $300 per pack of 100 users / site / month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase)
Anonymous users: ~AUD $115 per pack of 500 users / site / month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase)
Pay-as-you-go authenticated: ~AUD $6 per authenticated user (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase)
Pay-as-you-go anonymous: ~AUD $0.45 per anonymous user (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase)

A user is only counted in a month if they actually access the site that month, and capacity does not roll over. So a quiet month costs you less under pay-as-you-go, while a predictable steady audience is usually cheaper on subscription packs. Each authenticated pack also accrues 2 GB of Dataverse database and 16 GB of file storage to your tenant; each anonymous pack accrues a smaller 0.5 GB database and 4 GB file allowance. That bundled storage matters if your portal stores a lot of records or documents.

Power Apps pricing for a portal-style build

Power Apps Premium is sold per user per month — around AUD $29.90 per user (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase) for unlimited apps, with full Dataverse and premium connector rights. For internal users that is clean and predictable. The historical per-app plan (roughly AUD $8.40 per user) is being retired through 2026, so Microsoft is steering everyone toward the per-user Premium model as the default.

Here's the part that catches people out: a Power Apps per-user licensed staff member already has use rights to access Power Pages sites, and a Power Apps per-user licence grants unlimited Power Pages website access for that internal user. So your own employees hitting a Power Pages portal generally don't need a separate Power Pages capacity pack — their Power Apps or Dynamics 365 licence already covers them. Power Pages packs are really about the external crowd who hold no licence at all.

Worked example: a 2,000-visitor customer portal

Say you want a customer self-service portal expecting around 1,500 authenticated logins and 2,000 anonymous browsers in a typical month. On Power Pages subscription packs you'd size roughly 15 authenticated packs (1,500 ÷ 100) and 4 anonymous packs (2,000 ÷ 500): about 15 × $300 + 4 × $115, landing near AUD $4,960 per month indicative. On pay-as-you-go the same traffic is roughly 1,500 × $6 + 2,000 × $0.45, about AUD $9,900 — far more, which tells you steady audiences belong on packs.

Now imagine instead you tried to serve those same 1,500 external people through Power Apps per-user licences: 1,500 × $29.90 is about AUD $44,850 per month. That is the headline reason Power Pages exists — licensing external audiences as named Power Apps users is financially absurd at any real scale. The Power Apps route only wins when the audience is small, internal, and already licensed.

What we'd actually do

In practice we make the call on audience first, build platform second. If the portal is for the public or external parties, default to Power Pages and model the authenticated-versus-anonymous split honestly — most teams overestimate logins, and a lot of traffic that feels 'authenticated' is really anonymous browsing before a single gated action. Push as much as you can to the anonymous tier (information pages, lookups, status checks) and only force a login where it genuinely earns its keep, because authenticated capacity is roughly six times the unit cost of anonymous.

1Map your audience: internal staff (Power Apps), external authenticated, external anonymous.
2Estimate real monthly active counts per site, not total registered users — billing is by who shows up that month.
3Choose packs for steady traffic, pay-as-you-go for spiky or seasonal sites.
4Consolidate to as few Power Pages sites as practical, since packs don't pool across sites.
5Keep employees on their existing Power Apps / Dynamics licences rather than buying Power Pages capacity for them.

For internal-only tools — an inventory app, an approvals workflow, a field-service form — Power Apps per-user is almost always the right and cheaper answer, and you skip the Power Pages capacity question entirely. The moment your users are outside the tenant, the maths flips hard in favour of Power Pages capacity packs.

A note on the numbers

Every figure here is indicative AUD list ex GST and was derived from Microsoft's published US list pricing converted at a working rate — confirm at purchase. Microsoft bills Power Pages in USD, list prices change, and partner or enterprise agreements often shift the effective rate. Before you commit a budget, get a current quote scoped to your exact site count and expected monthly active users; the structure in this guide is what stays stable, not the cents.