Licensing madness/scaling

[JohnP]

Hi,

The PowerApps licensing changes that happened on october 1st is just madness unless you are MS and want to cash in on the short term. I'm baffled why there is not more outrage by these changes! All connectors (outside O365) are now premium and you need to pay for users wanting to access your already paid SQL Azure databases. MS buried the constructive critisism on this forum by restructuring the forum/bury the main thread here:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/News-Announcements-Formerly/New-PowerApps-and-Flow-Licensing-com...

This thread is almost impossible to find unless you participated in the thread and/or subscribed to it in the first place. There is still some activity, but not nearly as much as it should. I see almost no critisism on the forums now? Why? As of today there has been NO OFFICIAL response to all the well founded critisism in the mentioned forum thread.

As for our company we are leaving PowerApps behind ... not one of our customers is paying 1 million USD a year for a simple app that could be served by another service for 1000 USD.

[PaulD1]

Just to point out that there is also a thread on the 'main' forum regarding the new licensing: 

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps-Formerly/Help-understanding-powerapps-licens... 

I'm very dissapointed (being polite) like many others by the changes in October and the earlier changes which put the http action in Flow behind the premium 'pay wall' as well (a particular sore point as I needed to use that action to call Azure Cognitive Services apis because the supplied standard connectors do not expose all features).

These changes have prompted my team (who have built up a small practice specialising in PowerApps and Flow) to consider whether we are PowerApps developers or small-mid size solution developers and when the current pipeline of work dries up (as I expect it to due to the new pricing) we will have to choose which way to jump (aim more for the Dynamics and Modern Workplace markets or move to Xamarin, Blazor or other technologies).

While I have enjoyed working with PowerApps and have used the platform produced what I think are some good solutions in short time spans, the instability of the platform (I've had several production apps break in the last few weeks due to various platform changes rolled out by MS), the bugginess of the editor (causing lost development time) and now the huge price hike are causing me to lean in the Xamarin and Blazor direction.

Of particular concern is that 'SQL On-Premises Gateways' were moved to premuim earlier in the year causing some companies to move to Azure SQL only to find that that was made premium as well in October. Most Apps are expected to have lifespans of several years - even if, under the new licensing, an App makes financial sense today, given this track record, how can we be confident that will remain the case over the lifespan of the App?