The Power Apps Per-App Plan Is Retiring. It’s Forcing Overdue Power Platform License Optimization.

IT director and finance director reviewing a Power Platform license usage dashboard on a large office monitor

An IT director at a distribution company got her Power Platform renewal quote back in August and the per-app line item had a note attached: new purchases under that SKU were no longer available through her Enterprise Agreement’s normal channel. She had eleven apps running on per-app capacity packs, covering everything from a driver check-in tool to a rebate approval workflow, and nobody on her team had ever audited whether those apps still needed dedicated capacity or whether half their users had moved to other roles. The renewal conversation, which was supposed to be a formality, turned into a scramble to figure out what she was actually paying for, and into the kind of overdue Power Platform license optimization exercise most IT organizations keep putting off until a contract forces it.

IT director and finance director reviewing a Power Platform license usage dashboard on a large office monitor

That scramble is becoming common. Microsoft ended new sales of the Power Apps per-app plan on January 2, 2026, and the way that retirement plays out depends entirely on which purchasing channel an organization uses: Enterprise Agreement customers can keep renewing and adjusting counts through their normal true-up process, MPSA customers lose access to the SKU when their current agreement expires and get sixty days to move to something else, and CSP customers were largely unaffected, with the plan returning to availability there in early April. Three different outcomes for the same retirement, depending on how procurement happens to be structured, is exactly the kind of detail that gets missed until a renewal quote forces the question.

The timing matters because it coincides with something genuinely useful: Microsoft has finally shipped a way to see what a Power Platform license estate is actually being used for, instead of relying on procurement records and institutional memory. Getting that visibility in place before the next renewal cycle is the difference between a defensible Power Platform license optimization decision and another round of guessing.

Why Power Platform License Optimization Has Been Mostly Guesswork

Until recently, an organization trying to right-size Power Apps and Power Automate licensing had to stitch together the answer from several disconnected places: the Microsoft 365 admin center for what was purchased and assigned, PowerShell exports like Get-AdminPowerAppLicenses for a point-in-time snapshot, and whatever the CSP or EA reseller could pull from their own systems. None of those sources actually answered the question a CFO cares about, which is how many of the licenses being paid for are being used by someone doing real work in a given month.

The license consumption experience now available (in preview) inside the Power Platform admin center closes that gap. Under Licensing, administrators can pull up Power Apps and see, side by side, per-user licenses purchased against per-user licenses actually consumed by someone who launched an app in the last 90 days, per-app licenses allocated to environments against what was purchased, and any pay-as-you-go billing plans linked in the same view. It breaks down by environment as well as organization-wide, and it will export a CSV of active users, their last app launch, and which license type they used to get in. For an IT director trying to answer “do we actually need eleven per-app packs,” that is the first time the honest answer has been sitting in one screen rather than scattered across three systems and a spreadsheet someone built two years ago.

There is a companion version of this reporting for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations environments connected through the Power Platform admin center, and it is worth calling out separately because F&O licensing carries its own compliance exposure that per-app and per-user Power Apps licensing does not. That report maps security roles to license requirements and flags users who are under-licensed for the roles they hold, over-licensed relative to what they actually use, or missing a license entirely despite having role access. For a finance organization worried about a true-up or compliance review turning up unlicensed F&O access, that role-to-license breakdown is arguably more valuable than the Power Apps consumption view, because F&O license gaps carry direct compliance risk rather than just wasted spend.

Two enterprise IT professionals reviewing a printed license usage report and laptop dashboard during a renewal discussion

What This Changes About the Renewal Conversation

None of this reporting makes the decision automatically. It gives a CIO or CFO the input needed to make a real one, and there are three moves worth having on the table before the next renewal.

The first is treating the per-app retirement as a forcing function to re-evaluate whether per-app capacity was ever the right model for those specific apps in the first place, rather than assuming the goal is simply to find a like-for-like replacement. An app used constantly by a stable group of forty employees usually still makes sense on a capacity or per-user model. An app used sporadically by three hundred people across the organization, the kind of low-frequency, wide-distribution use case Microsoft explicitly points pay-as-you-go at, is often cheaper and administratively simpler on a consumption model tied to an Azure subscription, where there is no license procurement cycle at all and the organization pays only for sessions that actually happen.

The second is using the consumption report before, not after, the renewal negotiation. A vendor conversation about right-sizing an estate is a different conversation when the buyer walks in with an export showing which per-app allocations have had zero active users in the trailing ninety days versus one built on assumptions. That data also gives Finance a defensible basis for the true-up number instead of an estimate carried forward from the prior year.

The third is recognizing that pay-as-you-go billing plans allow granular cost allocation that traditional licensing does not. Because a billing plan links specific environments to an Azure subscription, and because Azure’s own cost management and resource tagging can then split charges by team or department, an organization running Power Platform across multiple business units can get a real chargeback model instead of a Power Platform budget line that IT absorbs and never breaks down by consumer. That is a meaningfully different conversation for a CFO than “the Power Platform bill went up again this year.”

What to Do Before the Next Renewal

For an organization anywhere in the Power Platform per-app transition, the practical sequence is straightforward even if the underlying decisions are not. Pull the license consumption report for Power Apps and, if applicable, the F&O consumption report, before assuming a renewal quote reflects actual need. Segment the app portfolio by usage pattern rather than by however licenses happen to be allocated today, since a capacity pack purchased three years ago for a pilot may now be covering an app that either died quietly or scaled to a very different usage profile. Confirm which purchasing channel governs the organization’s contracts, since an EA customer facing no disruption and an MPSA customer facing a sixty-day migration window are working against very different timelines, and the MPSA customer in particular should not wait for the renewal notice to start that conversation. And treat pay-as-you-go as a genuine option for the specific subset of apps that fit its profile, rather than a fallback only considered after per-user and per-app options are exhausted.

None of this requires a platform migration or a change to how the apps themselves work. It requires pulling data that, for the first time, is actually sitting in one place, and using it to make a licensing decision on facts rather than habit. Organizations that have gone through a Power Platform license optimization exercise with us tend to find the same thing: the spend was rarely wildly wrong, but it was almost never right, and the gap between those two states is usually worth the afternoon it takes to run the report.

Routeget Technologies works with IT and finance teams on Power Platform governance and licensing reviews as part of broader Dynamics 365 and Power Platform engagements.

#PowerPlatformLicensing #LicenseOptimization #PowerAppsPerApp #PayAsYouGo #PowerPlatformGovernance #ITCostGovernance

The Power Platform CoE Starter Kit Is No Longer Maintained. Here’s What Actually Replaces It.

IT governance director reviewing a Power Platform tenant governance dashboard on an office display

An IT Director at a mid-size manufacturer pulled up her Power Platform governance dashboard last month expecting the usual weekly refresh: new app registrations, a handful of DLP policy violations, a queue of flows awaiting review. Instead she found version numbers that hadn’t moved since February. The Center of Excellence Starter Kit her team built three years ago, the tool that had quietly governed more than 400 apps and flows across the tenant, had gone dormant. Nobody had announced a shutdown. It simply stopped getting updates, and the team only noticed because a routine compatibility check flagged an error the kit’s outdated code couldn’t handle.

That scenario is playing out across a lot of Power Platform tenants right now, because Microsoft has quietly, officially confirmed that the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is no longer being actively maintained.

IT governance director reviewing a Power Platform tenant governance dashboard on an office display

What Changed With the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit

The language matters here, because a lot of the discussion around this shift has overstated what happened. Microsoft’s own documentation, updated April 30, 2026, states plainly that the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is no longer actively maintained: issues submitted against the GitHub repository are no longer reviewed, and any genuine security concern should now be routed to the Microsoft Security Response Center rather than the project’s issue tracker. Monthly releases, which had shipped reliably in the first week of nearly every month for years, stopped after February 2026.

That is not the same as a retirement. Microsoft has not published an end-of-life date, has not blocked new deployments, and explicitly states the kit “remains available for both new and existing deployments.” Organizations running it today won’t wake up to a broken environment. What they will face, gradually, is a governance tool that stops keeping pace with platform changes: new connector types it doesn’t recognize, new environment settings it can’t report on, and eventually compatibility issues with Dataverse or Power Automate updates that nobody is fixing on the other side. For a CIO, this is a slower and in some ways more dangerous problem than a hard cutoff, because there’s no forcing deadline to put a migration project on the calendar.

The Native Replacement Microsoft Is Building

Microsoft’s stated direction is to fold CoE-style governance directly into the Power Platform admin center rather than leaving it to a community-maintained Dataverse solution. Four capabilities make up that shift, and they’re at different stages of maturity, which matters for anyone trying to plan around them.

Inventory gives tenant-wide visibility into every app, flow, and now agent across the organization, replacing one of the CoE kit’s original core functions: knowing what exists. Usage entered public preview on February 13, 2026, and Microsoft has targeted general availability for August 2026; it tracks adoption patterns, surfaces top resources and their owners, and sits in the licensing and capacity category of the admin center, which is a signal about where Microsoft sees the primary value: helping organizations understand what they’re actually consuming before a renewal conversation. Monitor, focused on detecting operational health issues across Power Platform resources, entered public preview in August 2026 with no GA date yet confirmed. And Actions, sometimes referred to as Power Platform Advisor, organizes personalized recommendations into four categories: security, operational efficiency, licensing and capacity, and performance, with the ability to remediate inline, automate a fix through Power Automate or PowerShell, snooze non-security items for up to two months, and share a recommendation into Teams for follow-up.

Separately, Microsoft previewed the concept of an “Agentic Center of Enablement” entering public preview in July 2026, framed as a longer-term, AI-driven successor to the CoE model built for a world where agents, not just apps and flows, need governance. It’s worth watching, but it is a preview-stage concept today, not something to build a 2026 governance budget around.

Solution architect reviewing a cloud governance and inventory dashboard alongside code at a dual-monitor workstation

Where the Native Tools Still Fall Short

None of this means the admin center is a drop-in replacement yet, and CIOs who treat it as one will find gaps. Partner analysis from governance specialists who have compared the two toolsets in detail, most notably Rencore’s review of the transition, points to real coverage gaps: shadow IT detection, the app and flow lifecycle and ownership-transfer workflows that let a departing employee’s assets get reassigned cleanly, visibility that spans multiple tenants for organizations with a multi-tenant structure, tracking of DLP policy violations across environments over time rather than as a point-in-time snapshot, and analysis of connector misuse or risky customization patterns. Those were never edge-case features in a mature CoE deployment; they were often the reason the kit got built in the first place.

This is the practical takeaway for anyone budgeting a governance program this year: the native tools are genuinely useful and getting better on a defined Microsoft release cadence, but they are not yet a full substitute for a well-built CoE kit deployment, particularly on the lifecycle and cross-environment tracking side.

What This Means for Budget and Governance Planning

The right response isn’t a rushed migration off the CoE kit, and it isn’t ignoring the situation either. A few decisions are worth making deliberately rather than by default. First, audit what your current CoE deployment is actually doing for you today: which dashboards get used weekly, which automated flows are load-bearing for compliance reporting, and which components have quietly gone unused since they were set up. Second, map that list against the admin center capabilities on their current timeline: Usage moving to GA in August 2026 is close enough to plan around now, while Monitor and the Agentic Center of Enablement are still preview-stage and shouldn’t be treated as committed infrastructure for this fiscal year. Third, price in the hidden cost most organizations forget: the CoE kit runs in its own dedicated Dataverse environment with its own capacity and maintenance overhead, and if native admin center tools can absorb even part of that workload, there’s a real capacity and licensing saving on the table, separate from the governance question entirely.

Finally, don’t assume the gap-filling has to be all-or-nothing. A common pattern emerging among organizations further along in this transition is a hybrid model: keep a thinned-down CoE kit running specifically for the lifecycle, ownership-transfer, and cross-environment tracking that Microsoft hasn’t natively replaced yet, while shifting license and capacity monitoring, security recommendations, and day-to-day operational health checks over to the admin center as those features reach general availability. That approach avoids both extremes: clinging to an aging toolkit out of inertia, or ripping out functioning governance infrastructure before its replacement is actually ready.

There’s also a licensing angle worth surfacing to a CFO, not just an IT Director. Because Usage sits in the admin center’s licensing and capacity category, it’s designed to answer a question most Power Platform tenants can’t currently answer with confidence: which licensed users, premium connectors, and per-flow capacity allocations are actually driving cost, and which are legacy grants nobody has revisited since a pilot project ended two years ago. A CoE kit deployment can surface some of this with custom Power BI reporting built on top of it, but that reporting has to be built and maintained by someone. Getting the equivalent view natively, once Usage reaches general availability, removes a maintenance burden that a lot of governance teams have been quietly carrying for years without budgeting time for it.

The Takeaway for IT Leadership

Governance programs built on the CoE Starter Kit haven’t failed and don’t need to be dismantled this quarter. But they do need a documented transition plan, because “no longer actively maintained” is Microsoft’s way of saying the clock is running even without a published deadline. Organizations that treat this as a planning input now, rather than an emergency later, will have the easier migration. We’ve helped several clients work through exactly this kind of platform transition, mapping existing governance investments against Microsoft’s native roadmap so nothing gets rebuilt twice, and it’s a conversation worth having before a compliance audit forces it.

#PowerPlatformGovernance #CoEStarterKit #DataLossPrevention #LicenseOptimization #PowerPlatformAdmin #EnterpriseAI