Most Power Automate guides are written by people selling Power Automate. This one is from a small Perth consultancy that builds on Microsoft 365 for a living and, on a fair few jobs, has told the client not to use it.
I'm Gavin Brown. GBIT works with small businesses, mostly in WA: trades, professional services, a law firm, an HR consultancy, a pipeline services company. Below is what Power Automate costs in Australian dollars right now, what you already own, and what we have actually seen go wrong.
What you already have
If your business is on Microsoft 365, you already have Power Automate. You don't need to buy anything to start.
Microsoft's licensing FAQ spells out what a normal Microsoft 365 licence gets you: automated, scheduled and button cloud flows, using the standard connectors. That covers Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Excel, Teams, Forms and Approvals, which is most of what a small business wants to join up.
What it doesn't cover is premium connectors, custom connectors, the on-premises data gateway, or unattended desktop automation. The official daily limit for a Microsoft 365 user is 6,000 actions, per Microsoft's request limits page.
That word "premium" is where the money starts. Anything that talks to a system outside Microsoft's standard list, or makes a raw HTTP call to another app's API, usually needs a paid licence.
What the paid plans cost in AUD
At the time of writing (September 2026), Microsoft's Australian Power Automate pricing page lists:
- Power Automate Premium: AU$22.40 per user per month, paid yearly
- Power Automate Process: AU$224.50 per bot per month, paid yearly
- Power Automate Hosted Process: AU$321.80 per bot per month, paid yearly
The page says those prices don't include GST. So if three people in your office each need premium connectors, that's about AU$806 a year before GST, every year. Not huge, but it's a running cost someone has to keep paying and keep assigned to the right people.
Premium is licensed to a person. Process is licensed to the automation itself, which suits a flow the whole business relies on no matter who's logged in. Microsoft changes these prices and plan names often, so check the page on the day you buy.
One thing that catches small businesses: you might not be the one who buys licences. At one of our clients, a law firm, the managed IT provider controls licensing, so any Power Automate licence has to go through them first. Find out who holds that key before you design anything that needs premium.
When we use it, and where it bit us
An HR consultancy's audit tool
The clearest lesson we have came from an audit tool for an HR consultancy. It started life as a Power App with Power Automate flows behind it. One flow exported the audit answers into an Excel file stored in SharePoint.
With 280 rows, that export took 2 minutes 18 seconds. The problem is that when a Power App calls a flow and waits for an answer, the flow has 120 seconds to respond. That limit is in Microsoft's cloud flow limits. So the flow finished the job, but the person using the app saw an error. From their side it looked broken.
Two more things went wrong on the same job:
- Each export locked the Excel file in SharePoint, so the next export failed with "locked for shared use". The fix is to give every export its own file name.
- Someone renamed a SharePoint library to something clearer. Every "create folder" step in the flows broke, because the flow still pointed at the old internal name. We had to rename it back.
In the end that tool was rebuilt as a standalone web app, partly for these reasons. None of this makes Power Automate bad. It means a flow sitting behind an app has a hard two minute window, and small admin changes in SharePoint can quietly break it.
A law firm's approval records
For the same law firm, we quoted a set of compliance registers where every record needs a senior manager to sign it off. That's a good fit for Power Automate. The approval step is built in, the people approving already live in Outlook and Teams, and it runs on the standard connectors they already pay for. Most of the build time for the first stage sits in the flows and in testing them as a normal staff account, not an admin one. If you only test as an admin, you won't see what your staff will hit.
When we don't use it
This is the part the big guides skip. Some of our best jobs had no flow in them at all.
A land survey business wanted field survey and vehicle inspection forms feeding into SharePoint lists, with email alerts. Their rule was clear: standard connectors were fine, but no premium connectors and no new licences. So we designed it to write straight into their SharePoint through Microsoft Graph and send alerts from one of their own mailboxes. No per-user Power Automate cost, and nothing tied to one staff member's login.
An excavation contractor needed new starters to fill in their details, scan their licences and sign a driver declaration from a phone. We built it as a small digital form web app that stores everything in the company's own SharePoint lists, again so they didn't need premium Microsoft licensing to run it.
The same contractor's SharePoint shows the other kind of "no flow needed". Each role has its own site, tied to a matching staff group. When their IT provider puts a new estimator in the estimators group, SharePoint access follows on its own. No flow, nothing to break. A lot of "can we automate access requests" jobs are really "set up SharePoint properly once".
The law firm's Xero link for leave and payslips was planned as a small custom function running in the firm's own Azure account, rather than a paid connector. It's on hold for now, but the reasoning stands: when a connection needs premium licensing for every user, a small bit of custom code that you own can cost less over a few years.
A pipeline services company came to us with a Power Apps app another contractor had built that they couldn't get working in their environment. We rebuilt it as a web app that keeps all its data in their SharePoint. The lesson there wasn't really about Power Apps. It was that if nobody in the business can fix it, the tool is a risk.
A few rules we stick to
These come from the jobs above, not from a checklist.
Give every flow a second owner the day it's built. When the only owner leaves, the flow becomes orphaned and steps using their connections can fail. Microsoft explains the clean-up in managing orphaned flows, but it's much easier to never need it.
Don't rename SharePoint libraries or columns once flows point at them. If you must, check every flow that uses them straight after.
If a form or app waits on a flow, keep that flow well under two minutes. Anything slower should reply straight away and carry on in the background.
Write down in plain English what each flow does and who to call when it stops. One page is enough.
And if a job lives mostly in spreadsheets, sometimes the better answer is fixing the workbook itself. That's what our Excel automation work is for.
Should you build it yourself?
For simple stuff, yes. Saving email attachments to SharePoint, a Teams message when a form comes in, a basic approval: an office manager can build those in an afternoon with the standard connectors you already own.
Get help when the flow touches payroll, tax file numbers or client money, when it has to connect to something outside Microsoft, or when you've inherited a pile of flows nobody understands. And get a straight answer on whether you need Power Automate at all before anyone quotes you for licences.
If you want that answer for your business, get in touch. If an afternoon on your own will sort it, we'll tell you.
