Pricing Model for Cyclic Usage Scenarios

[CNC]

Hi,

Looking for some clarity on the pricing model for Power VA…

I work at an educational college in the UK and we are looking to build a chatbot that will act as a virtual assistant that can answer the majority of our general student queries.

The idea is that new students who start at the college will be able to ask the virtual assistant questions and act as a “buddy” for them to adjust to life in college.

Examples of questions may be “Where can I get something to eat?” or “Where is the Student Services office?”, or “Who can I speak to about changing my course?”.

We have around 4,000 students and at present it is hard to predict how many chat sessions we will need licensing for.  We anticipate usage being very high, peaking when new students start at the college, and then tailing off throughout the year as students become familiar with college life.

However, the base license of 2,000 chat sessions may not be enough, so we may need to purchase add-on capacity of 1,000 chat sessions (how many add-on packs required is difficult to predict).

Are there any planned allowances / tolerances in the licensing SKU to allow for peak usage of chat sessions that may fluctuate throughout the year and where volumes of chat sessions are cyclic?

e.g. 

September = 40,000 sessions required.

July = Less than 2,000 sessions.

Thanks in advance!

[renatoromao]

Hi @CNC ,

Great opportunity to user Power Virtual Agents, is a great chatbot! 🙂

We don't have a way to do it yet. I created recently an idea to the price to be dynamic pay-per-use.

My scenario is: We have customers that probably per month will use 500 sessions or less. 

You can vote here: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/Create-a-license-based-on-pay-per-use-Power-Vir...

[CNC]

Thanks for you swift reply @renatoromao .  I have voted for your idea as the licensing model at present excludes a lot of great use-case scenarios!!

In Education our licensing is renewed annually every 12 months and is based on a per user basis, that also includes student use benefit.

Therefore, a licensing SKU that considered number of chat sessions per user would be beneficial.

e.g.  1 user license would allow for ???? chat sessions per user / month.

I have created this as an idea too, as there needs to better licensing approaches for all the various sectors that could use this great technology.  Please vote.

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/Power-VA-Per-User-Licensing-Education/idi-p/463...

[renatoromao]

Really nice idea @CNC !!!

I voted and you can make our answers like a solution to help more users and we improve this great product.

Thanks! 🙂

[NicholasPlant]

The current pricing model has been a subject of some debate in this forum with the consensus being that the present model is not really fit for purpose. There has been some indication from Microsoft that they are aware of the limitations and are looking about options but little indication of what the options might be. I would urge you to vote for the idea referred to above as that is the way to get MS to focus on the issue. 

[CNC]

Thanks @NicholasPlant 

I have voted for the pricing model ideas above.  Hopefully a more flexible model is on the horizon very soon.

In it's present form it isn't workable for our use-case scenario.  Any improvement that allowed either the number of sessions to scale based per user license (billed annually), or a consumption based (pay-as-you-go) model would be a huge improvement.