AI Builder pricing

[WebPortal]

Hello,

I've created an environment to test AI Builder "Form processing" model and consumed it with Power Automate.

It worked ok, but I've used all my free trial credits.

Questions:

1. How many credits have been awarded for free?
2. Are these credits awarded per user or per environment?
3. How can I know what consumes what? Per flow run? Per model? Per document?

I need to advise a customer about to buy AI Builder or an alternative, but all these questions are too opaque for me.

PS: The calculator doens't help.

Thank you!

[JoeF-MSFT · Accepted solution]

Hi @WebPortal,

Thank you for these questions.

AI Builder trials are per user and include a limited number of credits to be able to evaluate all AI Builder capabilities and use them in a flow or app for testing and evaluation purposes. 

Once you have purchased AI Builder credits, you will be able to see how credits are consumed in the following report in the Power Platform Admin Center: AI Builder consumption report - AI Builder | Microsoft Docs

The Power Platform licensing guide has recently been updated and now includes the rate card of how many credits are consumed per each model type: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2085130 (See the AI Builder capacity add-on section in the licensing guide).

If your customer is planning to do a large workload with AI Builder, they might be eligible for special discounts. Contacting Microsoft Sales can help provide the right quotation. 

I hope this helps clarify! Don't hesitate to ask additional questions. We hope your customer ends up choosing AI Builder. 🙂

[WebPortal]

@JoeF-MSFT 

Thanks for the feedback.

So, according to the rate card, the cost for AI Builder is 500 credits per page.

This means a $40/month power automate license will be able to scan 10 pages per month?

[JoeF-MSFT]

Hi @WebPortal - that is correct. If you purchase multiple per user plans with attended RPA , the credits for each license will add up at the tenant level. 

[WebPortal]

@JoeF-MSFT 

Thanks for your help, that looks Expensive 🙂

[JoeF-MSFT]

You're welcome @WebPortal. If your customer is planning to process a large volume, do consider reaching out to our friendly Microsoft sales team as you might be eligible for discounts. You'll find a contact form on the calculator page: AI Builder Calculator | Microsoft Power Automate

[skylitedave]

To follow up...  Let's say I wanted to scan 10,000 pages per month and I want to use a custom Model I built using FOSS with the Form Processing service running in Azure to extract the data.  If I use the calculator, I see that additional cost for the AI builder is $2500 USD per month in my flow which sounds pretty good to me. 

Is there anything else I need to purchase assuming I am storing the images I am going to process in a doc library in SharePoint and extracting the data into SharePoint lists - Assume SharePoint is running in O365... What about the Azure side of things...  does the $2500 cover any compute cycles in Azure or are there more costs in azure - if so, how would I estimate the additional azure costs.

Doc processing data extraction and the ability to build custom models with FOSS is amazing so trying to understand all the costs ...   Thx!

[JoeF-MSFT]

Hi @skylitedave - with the AI Builder credits you purchase you can run AI Builder models. Did you train an AI Builder document processing model? Create a document processing custom model - AI Builder | Microsoft Docs Or an Azure Form Recognizer model?

If you plan to use Azure Form Recognizer, then you will need to pay for the usage you do in your Azure subscription - you don't need AI Builder add-ons in this case.

And to clarify the difference between the two:

AI Builder document processing is built on top of Azure Form Recognizer. This provides both products with the latest advancements in Microsoft AI.

• AI Builder is part of Microsoft Power Platform. This enables anyone to add AI into apps and automation with an easy-to-use interface. You don't need to be a developer or data scientist. In this case you need to purchase AI Builder credits, but you don't need to have an Azure subscription. 
• Azure Form Recognizer is targeted to professional developers. They can use simple REST APIs to add AI capabilities to their custom code solutions. In this case you need to have an active Azure subscription, but you don't need to purchase AI Builder credits.

I hope this helps clarify.  

[lmac]

yup! the pricing is pretty over the top!   

[takolota]

@WebPortal @lmac @JoeF-MSFT @skylitedave 
So I built this template that processes any document just using the less expensive image recognition AI Builder service & GPT.

It seems much less expensive with a much lower barrier to entry only requiring a premium Power Automate license with 5000 AI Builder credits per month & some on-going LLM / GPT costs…

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Extract-Data-From-PDFs-and-Images-With-G...

If I’m looking at this right, this method should cost 

Image recognition +.0017

GPT prompt & output +.007

Flow actions +.00375

So about $ .013 per page.

Less expensive than any of the other microsoft document/receipt/invoice processing options. And several of those take about 30 seconds to run. 
And the 5000 AI Builder credits that come with the now $15 premium Power Automate license is enough for 1500 Image recognition pages. So you could probably process 500-750 documents per month with just 1 premium Power Automate license.

So it seems this method is faster, less expensive, easier to adjust, & requires less set-up than other standard AI builder set-ups.

Once the GPT actions are in general availability, I don’t know why I’d use any of the other services. 🤷‍

[powerappsoholic]

Thank you very much. Your posts have been really helpful! However, it seems to me that your price estimates are way too low. They might be accurate for machine pdfs. But for real life scanned jpgs and pdfs the credit consumption is much higher. At least by my testing. Never the less, thank you once again for your great insights to AI Builder and Power Platform.

[takolota]

@powerappsoholic 

These were estimates before Microsoft started charging credits for GPT actions, so I calculated the cost of the GPT actions based on the Azure LLM pricing. Microsoft may have annoyingly set the credit consumption significantly higher than the Azure costs. Please share any credit consumption data with me. I may be inspired to create an updated version of the template that uses an HTTP action to directly call an Azure service at a lower cost of $.001 to $.002 per 1000tokens/4000characters.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/openai-service/

[Nithish2413]

Hi all,

I have Created a Unstructured Document AI Builder, my Trail is Over now Where i need to buy Addon but i am not sure about the flow of input cases in my organization so is there an unlimited service in paid version

[Nithish2413]

Please Share your thought as soon possible