Setting up Billing Policy for Dataverse Environments in Power Platform for Azure Pay-As-You-Go plan | Microsoft Azure

Pay-as-you-go has been recently announced with Azure and I too wanted to explore this topic myself on my trials Dataverse/D365 Sales environment as well as my Microsoft Azure trial subscription which I started.

Disclaimer: Please note that I’m exploring this topic and sharing as I go on. Hence, I’ll continue to write further topics as I proceed. Please try on your Dataverse trial & Microsoft Azure trial subscription to identify / estimate the costs your actual implementation will incur.

I also recommend going through the below Microsoft Learn Pages for detailed information on pricing and meters of the Pay-as-you-go model –

Detailed Microsoft Docs for Pay-as-you-go: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/pay-as-you-go-overview?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Power Apps Pricing: https ://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Pay-as-you-go Meters: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/pay-as-you-go-meters?tabs=image?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Let’s see how we can get started!

Setting up Billing Policy

Here’s how you create Billing Policy in Power Platform –

In Power Platform Admin Center (https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/), you can see Policies section. If you expand the same, you can see Billing Policies.
Here, you can start by creating a new Billing Policy
You can give it an appropriate name. And it doesn’t allow you to have spaces.
Next, you’ll be asked to select the Subscription you wan to assign the Billing Policy under.
Notice the error below. My Free Trial Azure Subscription doesn’t have a Resource Group created yet. Hence, this need to be present.
Since at this point, I don’t have a Resource Group under the Azure Subscription I selected, I need to go to Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com/), search for Resource Groups
Since you might not have any Resource Group right away, you can create one.
I’ll just give it a name which I can identify with.
I’ll validate and Create the same in Azure.
Resource Group will be created here.
Now, when I come back to Power Platform, if I reselect the Azure Subscription, I’ll now see that the Resource Group I created is showing up.
I’ll select the same and select United States as the Region.
And click on Next.
In the next steps, I can select which all Environments should be included in the Policy. Then, I can click on + Add to policy.
You can see the Added to policy tab now showing your environment. Once you are satisfied with the selection, you can click on Next.
Final step is to now Review and confirm the policy you are creating.
It’ll take a moment to start provisioning. Then, you’ll see the status as Provisioning.
Once completed, the status will show as Enabled.
Now, when you go back to Azure Portal and open the Resource Group, you’ll find a Deployment show up
Open it up and you’ll see a Deployment created.
And if you open the Deployment, you can see the DataverseBilling which we had set up in Power Platform.
And this point, you are now setup with using Pay-As-you-go plan for your Dataverse environment(s).

Note: Further, I’ll write follow up posts as I explore Pay-as-you-go scenarios and experience myself.