There is a category of cloud spend that almost never appears in an Azure cost review. It doesn't show up in Azure Cost Management. It doesn't trigger any budget alerts. It sits in a completely different admin portal, managed by different people, and it grows steadily without anyone raising an eyebrow.
That category is Microsoft Power Platform.
Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI Premium, AI Builder. Collectively, these services can quietly account for three to five percent of an organisation's total cloud spend. We've seen cases where it's higher. And the reason nobody catches it is simple: Power Platform costs live in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, not in the Azure portal. If your FinOps practice only looks at Azure Cost Management, you're missing it entirely.
How Shadow IT Drives Power Platform Costs
The story usually starts the same way. Someone in finance, HR, or operations discovers that their Microsoft 365 licence includes access to Power Apps and Power Automate. They build a simple app or automate a workflow. No IT involvement required. No procurement process. No cost approval. It just works.
And at that point, it genuinely is free. The Power Apps and Power Automate capabilities bundled with Microsoft 365 E3/E5 licences include a limited set of standard connectors. Building a simple approval flow or a basic data entry app costs nothing beyond the M365 licence you're already paying for.
The problem starts when someone needs a premium connector. They need to connect to SQL Server, or Dataverse, or an external API via a custom connector. Suddenly the bundled capabilities aren't enough. A request goes in, sometimes to IT, sometimes directly to whoever manages M365 licences, and a Power Apps Premium or Power Automate Premium licence gets assigned. That's thirty to forty pounds per user, per month.
One licence is nothing. Ten licences across a team is noticeable. Fifty licences scattered across multiple departments, each assigned individually with no central tracking? That's a meaningful line item that nobody budgeted for.
Where the Costs Actually Hide
The fundamental challenge with Power Platform costs is visibility. They're scattered across multiple billing surfaces, and none of them are the one your FinOps team is watching.
Premium connector licences. These are assigned per user in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. There's no consolidated view that shows you "here is your total Power Platform licensing cost." You have to go hunting for it, user by user, or export your licence assignment data and filter it manually. Most organisations don't.
Power Automate flow licences. Beyond per-user licensing, Power Automate offers per-flow licensing at around one hundred and twenty pounds per flow per month for unattended scenarios. These are often purchased for specific business processes like an automated invoice handler or a data synchronisation job, then forgotten. The flow runs, the licence renews, and nobody checks whether it's still needed.
AI Builder credits. This is a newer cost that catches people by surprise. Power Automate flows can consume AI Builder credits for actions like document processing, text recognition, or sentiment analysis. These credits are billed separately and consumed without clear attribution to specific flows or users. You see a charge on your Microsoft invoice, but tracing it back to the flow that consumed it requires genuine detective work.
Dataverse storage. Power Apps that use Dataverse as their backend consume database storage, file storage, and log storage. Each Power Apps or Dynamics 365 licence includes a small Dataverse storage entitlement. Exceed it, and you're paying for additional capacity. The challenge is that Dataverse storage grows incrementally as business users build apps and store data, and nobody is watching the consumption meter.
Power BI Premium. This one deserves special mention because the cost jump is dramatic. Power BI Pro at roughly eight pounds per user per month is reasonable. But when an organisation needs Premium features like larger datasets, paginated reports, or deployment pipelines, the options are Premium Per User at around sixteen pounds per user per month, or Premium capacity starting at approximately three thousand eight hundred pounds per month for a P1 SKU. We've seen Premium capacity nodes running around the clock for reports that are only accessed during business hours. That's paying for twenty-four-seven compute to serve nine-to-five usage.
The Governance Gap
Here's the structural problem: IT teams manage Azure. They have cost management tools, budget alerts, tagging policies, and FinOps practices built around the Azure portal. Power Platform, by contrast, is often managed by nobody. Or it's managed by a business team that doesn't think of it as "cloud spend." Or it falls into a grey area between IT and the business where responsibility isn't clearly assigned.
This governance gap creates predictable outcomes. Environments proliferate because every team creates their own Power Platform environment and nobody told them not to. Premium licences accumulate because there's no review process for whether they're still in use. Flows run indefinitely because there's no lifecycle management. Apps get built, used for three months, and then abandoned, but the licences and storage remain.
The result is a steadily growing cost base with no oversight, no optimisation, and no accountability.
Environment Sprawl: The Multiplier Effect
Power Platform environments are easy to create and easy to forget. Each environment can have its own Dataverse database, its own set of apps, its own flows, and its own security configuration. In an unmanaged tenant, it's common to find dozens of environments, most of them created for a specific project or experiment and never cleaned up.
Every environment with a Dataverse database consumes storage. Every environment can have its own premium licences assigned. And because environments are invisible to anyone not actively looking in the Power Platform admin centre, they accumulate like forgotten subscriptions in Azure, except without the cost alerts to flag them.
What You Should Do About It
If Power Platform isn't part of your FinOps practice, it needs to be. Here's where to start.
Audit your M365 admin centre for Power Platform licences. Export your licence assignment data and filter for Power Apps Premium, Power Automate Premium, Power BI Premium, and AI Builder. Total up the monthly cost. The number will likely surprise you.
Implement Data Loss Prevention policies. Power Platform DLP policies control which connectors can be used together and in which environments. They're your primary tool for preventing shadow IT from connecting business apps to sensitive data sources without IT oversight.
Establish an environment management strategy. Decide who can create environments, what the naming convention is, and what the lifecycle looks like. Set a policy that environments without active use are reviewed quarterly and decommissioned if no longer needed.
Review Dataverse storage consumption. Check your current storage usage against your entitlement in the Power Platform admin centre. If you're consistently near or above your included capacity, investigate which apps and environments are consuming the most. Abandoned apps with growing datasets are a common culprit.
Consider licence consolidation. If you have many individual premium licences, evaluate whether a capacity-based licensing model would be more cost-effective. Microsoft offers pay-as-you-go pricing for Power Apps which can be cheaper than per-user licences for apps with occasional users.
Right-size Power BI Premium. If you're running Premium capacity, check utilisation patterns. If your capacity is idle outside business hours, consider whether autoscale or a smaller SKU with Premium Per User licences for your heaviest users would deliver the same capability at lower cost.
It's Cloud Spend. Treat It Like Cloud Spend.
The core message is straightforward: Power Platform is cloud infrastructure. The fact that it's billed through Microsoft 365 rather than Azure doesn't make it any less real. The fact that it's often provisioned by business users rather than IT doesn't make it any less your organisation's money.
If you have a FinOps practice that covers Azure but ignores Power Platform, you have a blind spot. And blind spots, by definition, are where waste accumulates unchecked.
The organisations that manage this well aren't the ones that ban Power Platform. The low-code capabilities are genuinely valuable, and business users building their own solutions is often a net positive for the organisation. The ones that manage it well are the ones that extend their governance, their cost visibility, and their optimisation practices to include it. Because a pound spent on an unused Power Apps licence is exactly as wasted as a pound spent on an idle Azure VM.
Think your Power Platform costs might be higher than they should be? Book a free cloud cost assessment and we'll help you find the spend that's hiding outside Azure Cost Management.