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Storage, integration and AI at Microsoft: SaaS and PaaS prices compared

By Tobias LehmeierPublished Facts as of:

I have been working in CRM for more than 25 years, and with Microsoft products since Microsoft CRM 1.2 (released in 2003). Today I support cloud transformation projects. Microsoft sells its cloud in two ways, among others: as a ready-made application (SaaS) and as a platform to build on yourself (PaaS). This article compares the list prices of both for storage, integration and AI, and names the licensing rules that apply.

Licensing and capacity: what Microsoft already enforces

My assessment is that Microsoft will enforce licensing and capacity much more consistently in the future. It is based on these published measures:

Measures Microsoft uses to enforce licensing and capacity
AreaWhat Microsoft has introduced or announced
Dataverse storageValidation from 9 November 2026, rollout by 4 December 2026. Above 100% effective consumption, no new environments, no copying, no restoring; 30 days later, only administrators can open the affected sandboxes (deadlines and checklist)
Premium flows without the required licensenotification to administrators; after 90 days, creating, copying and restoring environments is blocked, and after 180 days in total, further measures up to suspending flows are possible
Apps in Managed Environmentsin-app notifications since June 2026; from February 2027, an app no longer opens without the required license
Copilot Studioat 125% of the prepaid capacity, Microsoft disables custom agents

On Managed Environments, Microsoft writes that the requirement isn’t new; what is new are the in-app notifications since June 2026 and the block from February 2027. Reports on capacity, license consumption and flows without the required license are in the Power Platform admin center under Licensing. That is why you should plan licenses and capacity as early as the design of a solution.

SaaS and PaaS: what you pay for

With SaaS such as Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft runs the application: updates, scaling, network protection, automatic backups, production environments spread across several availability zones of a region. You pay per user and per capacity. With PaaS such as Azure Storage, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Azure SQL and Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft provides the platform and you pay for consumption: per gigabyte, per execution, per token. The price per unit is often lower by orders of magnitude. In return, you are responsible for the design, operation, monitoring and security configuration of the application. Microsoft describes this split in the shared responsibility model; data, settings and identities remain your responsibility in both cases.

In terms of functionality, some PaaS services offer more. Logic Apps exchanges business messages in X12, EDIFACT, AS2 and RosettaNet through an integration account. Azure Functions runs code in the common languages and, through custom handlers, in any other language that supports HTTP. In Azure SQL, you read and write with SQL; the Dataverse SQL endpoint is read-only. Microsoft Foundry offers models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek, among others, and lets you retrain some of them with your own data (fine-tuning).

Capacity: Dataverse or Blob Storage

Dataverse bills storage in three types: database, file and log. You buy whatever goes beyond the capacity included in your licenses. According to the German price page, database capacity costs €34.70 per GB per month. The German page gives no price for file and log. Derived from the US list prices of $2 and $10 in the ratio of the database prices (€34.70 to $40), they come to €1.74 and €8.68. In Germany West Central, with locally redundant storage (LRS), Azure Blob Storage costs €0.0172 per GB per month in the Hot tier, €0.0088 in Cool, €0.0040 in Cold and €0.0016 in Archive.

Calculation: 100 GB stored for one year (100 GB × price per GB per month × 12 months):

Cost of 100 GB of storage over 12 months
StoragePrice per GB per month100 GB for 12 months
Dataverse, database€34.70€41,640.00
Dataverse, log (derived)€8.68€10,416.00
Dataverse, file (derived)€1.74€2,088.00
Azure Blob Storage, Hot€0.0172€20.64
Azure Blob Storage, Cool€0.0088€10.56
Azure Blob Storage, Cold€0.0040€4.80
Azure Blob Storage, Archive€0.0016€1.92

A gigabyte of Dataverse database storage therefore costs about 2,000 times as much as a gigabyte of Blob Hot, and a gigabyte of log storage about 1,000 times as much as Blob Cool.

Blob Storage does not replace Dataverse. Blob Storage is object storage and has none of the security roles, business units and column-level security of Dataverse, no forms and views, and you can find content only through an additional index. Read and write operations cost extra. Cool, Cold and Archive charge for at least 30, 90 and 180 days, even if you delete earlier, and Archive is offline: rehydration takes up to 15 hours. Archiving tools therefore store rarely used data cheaply in Blob Storage and keep it findable through an index.

Integration: Logic Apps or Power Automate and Power Apps

In Power Platform, you pay per user or per process. Power Automate Premium costs €13.00 per user per month, the Process license €130.00 per month; it licenses one flow or a flow group of up to 25 flows for a combined 250,000 actions per day. Power Apps Premium costs €17.30 per user per month, or €10.40 from 2,000 licenses. Microsoft has not sold the Power Apps per app plan since January 2026; for usage-based billing, there is pay-as-you-go at $10 per active user per app per month.

Logic Apps has no per-user licensing. In the Consumption plan, you pay per execution: $0.000125 per Standard connector call, $0.001 per Enterprise connector call and $0.000031 per built-in action; the first 4,000 built-in actions per Azure subscription are free. The euro price list rounds these tiny amounts to four decimal places, which is why I calculate in US dollars here.

Example: a nightly sync between an ERP system and a custom Dataverse table, 500 records per night, about 2,000 actions (500 calls of the Dataverse connector, 1,500 built-in actions). The Dataverse connector is a premium connector in Power Automate and a Standard connector in Logic Apps. If the flow is owned by a service principal (Microsoft recommends this instead of a shared service account) and works outside the Dynamics 365 context, it needs a Process license or a designated user with a Premium license, and it then runs on that user’s daily allowance of 40,000 actions.

Cost of Logic Apps Consumption and Power Automate for two load profiles
ServiceNightly sync: 2,000 actions per nightSustained load: 200,000 actions per day
Logic Apps Consumption$3.15 per month$326.88 per month
Power Automate€130.00 ($150) with a Process license or €13.00 through a designated Premium user€130.00 ($150) with one Process license

Calculation for the nightly sync, 30 nights: 15,000 connector calls × 0.000125 = $1.88; 45,000 built-in actions minus the 4,000 free ones, so 41,000 × 0.000031 = $1.27; $3.15 in total. Calculation for the sustained load, assuming a quarter are connector calls: 6 million actions per month, 1.5 million × 0.000125 = $187.50 plus (4.5 million − 4,000) × 0.000031 = $139.38.

For the nightly sync, Logic Apps costs $3.15 per month; in Power Automate, the same flow needs a Process license for €130.00 or a designated Premium user for €13.00. At 200,000 actions per day, the Process license, at $150, costs less than half of Logic Apps Consumption. For sustained load, Logic Apps also offers the Standard plan, which runs on a fixed hosting plan: the smallest, WS1 with 1 vCPU and 3.5 GB of memory, works out at €158.12 per month (730 hours × (€0.1732 + 3.5 × €0.0124)); built-in actions are included free of charge, connector calls are not. Power Automate with billing per run (pay-as-you-go, preview, $0.60 per run) would come to $18 per month for the nightly sync.

Power Automate includes the designer for business users, the direct Dataverse connection, governance in the admin center and the Microsoft 365 connectors. A logic app needs an Azure subscription, deployment through your pipeline and monitoring of its own.

Multiplexing and permitted approaches

Microsoft defines multiplexing as hardware or software that pools connections, reroutes information, makes it accessible indirectly or reduces the number of users who use a product directly. According to Microsoft, multiplexing does not reduce the number of licenses required. Anyone who enters, queries or views data must be properly licensed, directly or indirectly, and the number of technical layers in between does not change that. This is what the Power Platform Licensing Guide says; according to Microsoft’s multiplexing overview, the same applies to Dynamics 365.

According to Microsoft, a service account with one Premium license through which many people use a flow is multiplexing. A portal or interface through which employees read Dynamics 365 data does not replace their license. Anyone who copies Dynamics 365 data to Azure in an automated process also needs, according to Microsoft, a suitable license for everyone who uses that data there.

You serve external users, meaning neither employees nor contractors who regularly work for you, in a license-compliant way through Power Pages: €173.30 per website per month for 100 authenticated users, €65.00 for 500 anonymous users. For background processing without users, for example from Azure, Dataverse has identities of its own (application users) with a separate request allowance per tenant; Microsoft’s example is a process that moves data between databases. As soon as people use the results, the licensing rule applies again.

This is not legal advice. Before you build architectures in which many people work through a few accounts, portals or interfaces, have them reviewed by your Microsoft contact or licensing partner.

AI: Microsoft Foundry or Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot costs €26.00 per user per month with annual billing and requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 license. In return, Copilot works in Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel with the data the individual user has access to. You build your own agents with Copilot Studio, which bills in Copilot Credits. A pack of 25,000 credits per month costs €173.30; pay-as-you-go, one credit costs €0.0088 (Azure price list). According to Microsoft, a generative answer costs 2 credits and an agent action 5 credits.

Microsoft Foundry, formerly Azure AI Foundry, is the PaaS side: you pay per token. In the “Data Zone” deployment type, the GPT-5.4 mini model costs €0.726 per 1 million input tokens and €4.3559 per 1 million output tokens (Germany West Central). If the resource is in the EU, Microsoft processes requests of this deployment type within its EU Data Boundary, that is in EU and EFTA countries.

Example: 10,000 incoming e-mails per month are to be assigned to a category automatically. Calculation for Foundry, assuming 1,000 input and 200 output tokens per e-mail, including the model’s internal reasoning steps: 10 million × €0.726 per million + 2 million × €4.3559 per million = €7.26 + €8.71 = €15.97 per month. Calculation for Copilot Studio, assuming an autonomous agent with two agent actions per e-mail (classify, file): 2 × 5 = 10 credits per e-mail, 100,000 credits per month. That is four packs for €693.20, or €880.00 pay-as-you-go. Depending on how the agent is built, it can be more; Microsoft bills a reasoning model at an additional 10 credits per 1,000 tokens.

Copilot Studio includes the user interface, connectors, channels such as Teams, governance and billing through the admin center; some Dynamics 365 licenses already include credits. With Foundry, you develop it yourself: code, hosting, monitoring, security, plus the process that hands the e-mails to the model. Copilot Studio can also use a model from Foundry; Foundry then bills the processing by token, and Copilot Studio counts the call as an agent action.

Combining SaaS and PaaS

What users work with every day stays in SaaS: Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Copilot. Volume and heavy processing belong where they cost the least, as long as this is sound under the licensing terms: audit history and rarely used files in Blob Storage, nightly bulk syncs in Logic Apps, the classification of thousands of e-mails in Foundry. Decide each case based on a calculation with your volumes and a review of the licensing rules.

NXTGN helps you decide what stays in SaaS and what belongs in PaaS, and calculates with your tenant’s figures. An example from our own product: NXTGN Capacity Control moves Dataverse audit data to the customer’s Azure Blob Storage.

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