Something that is causing a lot of confusion in the Power Platform community at the moment is trying to figure out the impact of request limits. Particularly for organizations with “legacy” Dynamic CRM instances that load data from back end systems into Dataverse on a regular basis. Many of these integration processes were built long before Dynamics CRM transitioned to the Power Platform as Dataverse. Most data load processes use non licensed user accounts and their Power Platform requests are allocated from a tenancy base request capacity rather than a licensed user’s allowance. This post explains how the Base Request Capacity works and what happens when you exceed your daily request allowance.
What are Power Platform Requests?
Power Platform requests includes not just actions from Power Apps but also the following
- Custom Code that uses either the Dataverse SDK or calls the Web API
- Plug-in and classic workflows – each action is considered a request. A Plugin that retrieves a record and does three updates counts as four requests
- Power Automate Flows – each action in a flows is considered a request. info
- Logic App – Power Platform actions are counted as requests as well as incurring an Azure charge.
Non Licenced User Request licenses
Dataverse has four types of accounts that don’t need licenses to interact with the service.
- Application users
- Non-interactive users
- Administrative users
- System user
Two of them are typically used by data load/integration processes and they are Application users and Non-interactive users. All of the non licenced users accounts share from a single pool of daily requests known as the base request capacity.
Base Request Capacity Allowance
The base request capacity allowance is based on the most expensive user license in your tenancy. The number of licenses in your tenancy makes no difference to the base request capacity. If you have 1,000 Dynamics 365 enterprise licenses you still only get 100,000 requests as your tenancy’s base capacity. If you just have one Power Apps license your daily base request capacity is 25,000 requests. The base request capacity is tenancy based and you need to be aware of this if you have multiple instances for performance and data privacy reasons.
Exceeding your Base Request Capacity
Once you have exceeded your Base Request Capacity you will need to purchase a Power Apps or Power Automate capacity add-on. (Details on addons here) 10,000 extra requests costs 42.20 euros per month
As an example, if your non-licensed users make 200k requests in a day then the number of monthly add-on licenses you will need to purchase will range from 10 to 18 depending on your base request license.
| Base Request Licence | Cost | No Add-Ons | Add-on Cost | Total Cost |
| Dynamics 365 Enterprise | € 80.00 | 10 | € 424.00 | € 504.00 |
| Dynamics 365 Pro | € 42.00 | 15 | € 636.00 | € 678.00 |
| Power Apps or Power Automate | € 8.40 | 18 | € 763.20 | € 771.60 |
It looks like purchasing a Dynamics 365 Enterprise license is a good idea as it gives 100k as your Base Request Capacity allowance.
Promotional Offer – Per App Plan
Microsoft is currently running a promotion offer on Power Apps pricing. If you purchase 200 Per App Plans you will pay $3 instead of $10 per month. I don’t have a euro price for the offer but I will assume it is roughly €2.60 per month. This promotion lasts until 20th June 2021 and from my understanding of licensing agreements you can lock this in for three years. So for €520 per month, you get 200 Per Apps Plans and each plan gives you 1,000 requests per day so using this offer you get 200,000 additional requests per day. The promotional offer looks like a reasonable deal in comparison to purchasing capacity add-ons. Granted managing and allocating 200 Per Apps licenses will take more effort than allocating 18 capacity add-on’s. Details here
Promotional Offer – Storage Bonus
Each AppsPer App plan also comes with an additional storage capacity of 50mg database and 400 meg file storage.
| Per Apps Plan Storage | Per Plan mb | Total 200 plans gig | Add-on Cost | Total Cost |
| Database Storage | 50 | 10 | € 33.70 | € 337.00 |
| FileStorage | 400 | 80 | € 1.69 | € 135.20 |
| € 472.20 |
To purchase this additional storage would cost €472 per month so the promotional offer looks even better now. Details on Dataverse capacity here.
Summary
I started this post by explaining what the Power Platform Base Request Capacity is and the implications for organizations that make lots of requests. Because the Base Request Capacity is applied at the tenancy level across all non licensed user accounts it could easily get exhausted. Following on from this I did some analysis on the costs of making 200k daily requests using non licensed users. I ended up by looking at the pricing of the current Microsoft promotion for Pers Apps Plans. There are two things worth considering with respect to your base request capacity.
The first is purchasing a single Dynamics 365 Enterprise License for €80 per month as this will allocate 100k requests to your base request daily allowance. If you exceed your allowance you will need to purchase capacity add-ons and each one adds 10k requests per day for 42 euros per month.
The second is to take advantage of the Microsoft promotion and purchase 200 Per Apps Plans for €520 per month to get an additional 200,000 daily requests. In addition to this, you will get extra storage capacity which would cost you €472 per month on its own.
Cavet: please do your own due diligence when considering this approach as I am not a licensing expert.
