Power Pages licensing

[apangeles]

Hi everyone, 

About the licensing for Power Pages, when in the process should we subscribe to the offerings shown on the Microsoft website? I'm curious because when testing the website, setting it as public, pretending as an external user, and accessing it via incognito in my browser, I could freely use the website I created. 

The question is why is it like this? Is it because of my current license from the company I work in? What other features does subscribing do for the website? I also see details pertaining to storage but I didn't understand them completely. Can anyone expound?

Thank you and regards

[Squire4Hire]

You might benefit from reading through this FAQ and this Licensing Overview.

The way I understand it is that it's difficult to truly test a Power Pages site as an anonymous user until the site has gone live. There might be a way to do it but a user can't access a Private (test) site (unless they've been given permission to view it in Private Mode via an email login). If it's not Public, any user that needs to see it must be an Authenticated User - which means they aren't Anonymous. You are likely Authenticated to test your site, which means you aren't actually seeing what an Anonymous User would/might see. This is where Dataverse Table Permissions are important to configure properly.

The difference between Authenticated and Anonymous Users is the need to log in to the site. You can publicly serve up internal data from Dataverse to Anonymous Users that don't require them to log in, but you would probably require Authenticated Users to log in in order to create/edit/delete data for the site.

A blog might be a good example of this. The public (Anonymous User) needs to consume the blog but shouldn't have to log in to read entries. But you might have an administrator (Authenticated User) log in daily to create or edit blog entries using a form you created on the site that only authenticated users can see or have access to.

So your licensing should be reflected accordingly. If you have only 1 user that will ever log into the site to create/edit/delete data from webpages you've created for them, then you're likely not going to need more than 1 Authenticated User subscription. And if you anticipate 100000 new Anonymous Users to hit your website each month, then you're either going to want to buy a big license bucket, or choose the pay-as-you-go option for Anonymous Users.

I hope that helps!

[Fubar]

Microsoft is a bit lenient with regards to strict enforcement of the licencing, however if you abuse it by having lots of usage or they detect that you have it up and running for an extended period without the appropriate licencing you will one day find that your site is no longer operating - so it is recommended that you comply with the licencing ASAP. 

Note: some user licencing includes licencing (use rights) for portal/Power Pages (e.g. a Dynamics 365 for Sales  Enterprise licence) and so sometimes an additional licence is not required depending on your existing licencing rights.

Some more info is contains in the Power Platorm Licencing Guide (link on this page https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/pricing-billing-skus#power-apps-and-power-aut...)