PowerApps is a platform for app development that belongs to the Microsoft Power Platform, in addition to Power BI and Power Automate. It is a low-code based platform where anyone can build professional-grade apps while being capable of connecting to a large variety of data sources, in order to access all the information needed to complete the app. It also can be connected to Microsoft Dataverse, a smart data platform which allows fast and easy data management apart from being secure and scalable while requiring no coding.
To be able to visualize a PowerApps application once integrated in a PowerBI report, a license is needed. There are two main plans: Subscription plan and Pay-as-you-go plan. The first one is aimed to businesses who want a regular user-based license and is divided in two plans, ‘Per app plan’, which runs one app or portal per user; and ‘Per user’ plan, which runs unlimited apps and portals per user. The second and last plan is for businesses who want to pay only when a user runs an app.
If more information is needed about the plans you can check the following links, About Power Apps per app plans and Pay-as-you-go plan overview. Moreover, for more information about pricing, please follow this link: Pricing – Power Apps. Both plans in the ‘Subscription Plan’ can be purchased through the link previously mentioned by just clicking the ‘Buy now’ option below each one’s description.
If you only have one app which you are going to use, I recommend purchasing one ‘Per app plan’ from the ‘Subscription Plan’ as it would be more profitable due to you will be paying $5 instead of $20 for the same app per user. This can also apply in case of having two or three apps which will be being used periodically, as the amount to pay will raise to $10 or $15 per user for all the apps. From four active apps and ongoing, is better to study each case and choose the most profitable plan.
Furthermore, a Production type environment is needed in PowerApps to hold permanent work in the organization. The environment can be created with the license purchased as previously mentioned, but only two of this type of environment, along with two Trial type environments, can be created. To create a Production environment in PowerApps, first of all you need to access PowerApps Admin center and to the Capacity window in the Resources option of the menu. There you need to check the database capacity you already have, as for the creation of a Production environment, 1 GB of space is required. With the purchase of a license, your organization gets 5 GB of Database capacity, 2 GB of Log capacity and 20 GB of File capacity, and with every license you will get 50 MB of Database and 400 MB of File capacity. This means you can already create a Production environment as you have enough Database space and have far more than enough File capacity to hold your data in the Dataverse without any storage problem.
As you have enough database capacity for the Production environment, press on the ‘New’ button in the ‘Environments’ panel to create it.
After you click it, the following panel will appear, and the details of the new environment have to be filled. The two most important things to check are to set the Type to ‘Production’ and mark as ‘Yes’ the option of creating a database for the environment. Then click on ‘Next’ to continue.
The last step is completing the other panel. Some items worth mentioning are to correctly set the Currency and to select a Security group, which is a good practice to avoid any security break.
Now you can freely create and use tables from Microsoft Dataverse and PowerApps applications, but in case of needing more file space, which will not be the case with few apps and tables, you can buy additional capacity through Microsoft 365 Admin Center following this instructions, Add Microsoft Dataverse storage capacity – Power Platform.