What’s new in Power Platform Licensing – December 2024

Well, it isn’t exactly December 2024 anymore…. I was on holiday in December, visiting family in Germany, and not unexpectedly didn’t really spend a lot of time online. Then came January, quickly followed by February, and I finally decided to catch up on this again.
So, without further ado, here are the changes between the November 2024 version and the December 2024 version of the Power Platform Licensing Guide (note: I recommend opening the actual PDFs to see the various charts in more detail – I decided to share side by side comparison here, so not all text can be easily read on the screenshots):

A smaller change was made on page 4, where the “Power Automate Process Mining add-on” was promoted from the subscription add-on licenses to the subscription licenses section (losing “add-on” in its title). Also, Copilot Studio pay-as-you-go meter was added to the pay-as-you-go meters.

Copilot Studio

Now, this is an interesting change. The Summary of Copilot Studio (page 7) was updated such that the Copilot Studio for Teams (was PVA for Teams) column has been removed. I asked Microsoft recently if this is still a valid option, but have not yet received a definite answer. It should also be noted that it is mentioned that “Agents built on Copilot Studio, for Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot, are included with the M365 Copilot license at no additional charge.”, so potentially Microsoft is shifting the focus from the “free in Teams” version to the “no additional charges with M365 Copilot”.
Additionally, the Copilot Studio subscriptions is no longer listed here (see below for more details), but rather the Copilot Studio pay-as-you-go is now shown. I would have expected both of them to be shown here in this table.

For the Copilot Studio in Microsoft 365 Copilot column, the Generative AI row has been updated from a dot (so it’s include) to Limited. The footnote for this says: “Utilization of agents created using “classic orchestration” mode that consumes Classic Answers and Generative Answers for Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot is included in the M365 Copilot user license at no additional charge.“
Dataverse for Copilot Studio is also no longer listed as included here – but a few pages later it is still shown! Watch out for future versions of the Licensing Guide that should correct this.
Lastly, Available channels to publish your copilot/plugins was updated from Microsoft 365 Copilot only to Microsoft 365 experience (see below for more details).

Further down at page 18, the section with more licensing details was expanded to provide detailed information on the new Copilot Studio pay-as-you-go meter. The previous Copilot Studio subscription is now referred to as Copilot Studio message pack subscriptions.

The Billed Messages area has been updated a bit, but mostly just making the wording a bit clearer and changing the formatting:

Another section that has received more detail is the one that explains what is included with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot Studio for Teams has disappeared here, only Copilot Studio in Microsoft 365 Copilot is listed (which basically sounds like the for Teams version is no longer valid).

Down at page 20 we have another overview again of the licensing options. Here we have both pay-as-you-go and message pack subscription show, as well as the M365 Copilot details. As mentioned before, Dataverse for Copilot Studio is listed as included here for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

AI Builder Rate Card

The AI Builder Rate Card has been updated slightly, the AI Prompts, Create text with GPT 3.5 has been replaced with AI Prompts, Create text with GPT 4o Mini. This new capability is also a bit cheaper with half of the cost of the previous GPT 3.5 capability (see screenshot below).