Hey, how are you all doing?
Is Power Automate free? This is a great question. When I first got into the Power Platform, Power Automate or Microsoft Flow as it was called then was my gateway into the rest of the platform in general.
I started off by using the existing previous work Microsoft 365 site wide subscription to build a Form and then get those answers and process them with Power Automate. I was blown away at the ease of use. As I have spoken before in previous blog posts, I am a visual learner and have never been into coding in the traditional sense, and I was able to get up and running very quickly with Power Automate.
As it wasn't in my job description of my job then, I needed to learn more and develop what I had started with and so I decided to get my own Microsoft Office 365 Business Essentials license.
Jon Does Flow was born !
I was able to run through the sign up process very quickly and get my Office 365 tenant up and running in no time at all.
I have just looked it up again and Microsoft have renamed the Business Essentials account to Microsoft 365 Business Basic, and you can get it for the best part of £5 a month, you can sign up here
What does this give you when it comes to Power Automate and Power Apps? Below are two screenshots from my Admin Centre from www.office.com
With this I have Power Automate as a free cloud based application, but with the upgrade of to the premium license of Power Automate I can use premium connectors.
Now I am going to tell you a secret, before my foray into full blown Power Platform Consultancy, I didn't realise you could get all of this through a free community trial. Not only that, but it doesn't expire. You can do this through this link here
And you can get access to all of this:
The community plan is effectively a developer environment for you to use and gives you access to PowerApps premium features like Dataverse and Power Automate premium features. It is primarily meant for testing purposes.
If you then wanted to go further with this, then you can even sign up for a Dynamics 365 trial license, using the account you create for the Community Trial PowerApps license. You can do that here
In summary, you can sign up for Power Automate for a free by signing up for a community plan/developer trial account and if you want to convert this to a production account you can do at anytime.
More details on this can be found on Microsoft Docs.
I hope this gives you enough info to get started, just be inquisitive, keep asking questions and if you love automation you will get to grips with this product in no time at all.
Thanks for reading, if you have any questions, please get in touch.
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