Back-of-Envelope: When Does Power Platform Make Sense?

March 13, 2024

Can a single citizen developer make a difference using Power Platform? Let's find out by looking at three ideas for very different organizations: a condo association, a music school, and a convention center.

My very first Power App was Back-of-Envelope, a canvas app to estimate the monthly cost of deployment for any combination of Power Platform licenses based on the published Licensing Guide rates.

Using the app, I can create a notional package containing any number of Power Platform licenses, and then calculate the back-of-envelope cost, whether per-month, per-year, per-user, per-bot, per-website, or per-tenant. (Consulting, development, and ongoing maintenance not included.)

Let's go shopping!

Case study #1: Condo association

I live in a nice 20-year-old condo. The HOA hires a property management company to do the books and provide various other services, including a website portal from a third-party SaaS company. The website seems about as old as the building. It's out-of-date, underpowered, and hard to use on mobile devices.

Power Platform to the rescue!

Power Apps: We'll need a model-driven app for building management and the board of directors, plus canvas apps for the front desk. That's 10x Power Apps Premium licenses.

Power Automate: It's hard to predict requirements until we get into the weeds, but let's start with one Power Automate premium plan for the developer and take it from there.

Power BI: 10x Power BI Pro licenses to supply dashboards for the board and building manager, plus a developer license.

Power Pages: The website would have to support up to 300 authenticated users.

Copilot Studio: In for a penny, in for a pound. Let's add a chatbot!

And the back-of-envelope, please:

• $270 per month for Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI

• $600 per month for 300 authorized users on Power Pages

• $200 per month for Copilot Studio chatbot

Total: $1,070 per month

Verdict: NO-GO.

Given the increased cost of insurance over the past few years, there's no room in the budget for nice-to-have items on the wish list.

Case study #2: Music school

I've been playing in jazz combos arranged by a local music school that matches eager adult learners like me with professional musician-instructors.

It's not easy to put together jazz combos. Unlike classes limited only by classroom size, jazz combos have one and only one of each instrument type (e.g. drummer, bassist, guitarist, pianist, horn player), and all players should be at around the same skill level. The school's website template wasn't built for these requirements. As a result, the staff manages classroom rosters by hand, which often leads to delays, confusion, and some frustration.

Power Platform to the rescue?

Power Apps: The good news is that with nonprofit pricing, the first ten users are free! And additional users are just $2.50 per month. Let's allocate 10 for the staff and 25 for the instructors.

Power Automate: Again, who knows. But an enrollment app will require scheduled flows. Power Automate premium plan for the developer, and one process bot for the organization.

Power BI: Nine board members, four staff, that's 13x Power BI Pro licenses.

Power Pages: A new website would have to support the entire student base, past and present, plus anonymous access for anyone who's curious about one of their posters seen around town. For a quick estimate, let's just say 1,000 authorized and 10,000 anonymous users.

Copilot Studio: It's starting to feel expensive. Let's skip this one.

Back-of-envelope calculation:

• $147.50 per month for Power Apps Premium, Power Automate Premium, and Power BI

• $150 per bot/month for Power Automate Process Bot

• $2,000 per month for 1,000 authorized users of Power Pages

• $1,500 per month for 10,000 anonymous users of Power Pages

Total: $3,797.50 per month

Verdict: NO-GO.

What starts out affordable at the app-building stage gets to be pricey with automation and analytics, and downright prohibitive for website deployment.

How about we skip the new website and the fancy dashboards and just write a tightly focused Power App that handles enrollment matching based on data exported from the current website into Excel. Using a focused solution, the program director could speed through enrollments with just 1x Power Apps license and 1x Power Automate license for confirmation emails.

Total: $35/month.

Verdict: Now we're getting somewhere.

Case study #3: Convention center

I first had the idea to become a Citizen Developer while working in Guest Services as a lead Admission Attendant.

While dealing with a thorny spreadsheet, I came across a video about Samit Saini, who had been working in airport security at Heathrow Airport when he discovered Power Apps. He built a proof-of-concept app for a mobile "language book" containing airport rules translated into numerous languages. That app propelled him into an exciting IT career. He's now Power-Platform-famous.

I worked as a database developer a long time ago. And now, given front-of-house knowledge about the inner workings of the event business and a full suite of low-code tools at my disposal, I realized that I was in an ideal position to provide exceptional value to SCC, even beyond the stellar service I was already providing to guests as an Admission Attendant.

By connecting Power Platform via APIs to Seattle Convention Center's event management software, anything and everything would be possible.

But what would it cost? Let's do a back-of-envelope calculation. (And for now, I'll just stick to solutions for Guest Services shift leads and managers.)

Power Apps: 12x Power Apps Premium, putting concise, detailed, and organized event information onto the handheld devices of the Admission Attendant and Transportation Attendant full-time leads.

Power Automate: Scheduled flows to fetch the latest information from the event management software and distribute it as needed, plus automations for efficient email management. 3x Power Automate Premium licenses for IT staff, 3x Power Automate Process bots.

Power BI: 10x Power BI Pro for managers to see service quality dashboards.

Power Pages: Not needed at this time.

Copilot Studio: Set up a chatbot with access to a full library of documents about all ongoing events in both buildings, facilities in the building itself, and information about restaurants and hotels in the neighborhood, the city. For the estimate: Copilot Studio costs $200 for 25,000 messages per month. If we give this capability to the shift leads, four front-of-house people, that's a budget of about 200 messages per day, or 100 Generative AI messages per person, or 12 per hour, or one request every five minutes. We'll start there. (Some days are slower than others.)

Back-of-envelope calculation:

$385 per month for Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI

$450 per month for Power Automate Process bots

$200 per month for 25,000 messages using Copilot Studio

Total: $1,035 per month

Verdict: What are you waiting for?

(Consulting fee and/or salary plus snack machine budget not included.)

Best use cases for Power Platform

As these case studies illustrate, Power Platform can do a great many things, but it only makes sense given proper alignment between business requirements and budget.

For a condo association, it's always going to be hard to make the numbers work. There are simply too many people involved, whether board members or residents, to contemplate per-user licenses under intense budget scrutiny.

The best use cases appear to be at opposite ends of the curve:

• Quick solutions to a specific problem for a single user. Find areas where the business benefit clearly exceeds the monthly license costs. This is shown in the music school case study, where a relatively quick fix would address a single troublesome area. Here's where citizen developers can deliver quick wins for the organizations they support.

• Comprehensive solutions for an enterprise already on the Microsoft stack. Economies of scope create new opportunities for value creation. In the case of the convention center, even looking at a single department yields several promising areas for improvement, not to mention transformational potential using Generative AI. (Since SCC represents Seattle as a tech hub to the world, this is no small thing.)

Note that you can't swap strategies.

The music school can't afford a comprehensive solution appropriate for a much larger entity.

Likewise, the convention center shouldn't try to apply one-off fixes to small problems as would a small school. As a public facilities district, SCC would be well advised to deploy a complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) plan, establish a Center of Excellence (CoE), and foster a supportive culture that allows enthusiastic citizen developers within their ranks to offer their expertise toward the betterment of the organization.

That's the way things look now. But what about three to five years from now?

In the years to come, we should expect an order-of-magnitude decrease in pricing for powerful solutions built on low-code platforms. There's simply too much AI-supercharged programming talent out there for things to play out any other way.

Today's premium version will end up as tomorrow's free version.

As low-code tools become more powerful, citizen developers will become increasingly able to drive visible transformations in our community and civic organizations.

And building on that success, citizen developers will be better prepared to implement the premium capabilities of tomorrow, whatever they may be.