Microsoft Power Pages licenses your visitors: every unique user, every site, every month. The same Dataverse data can be served from a WordPress site or an Azure Static Web App on flat hosting, through the official Web API, with the records never leaving Dataverse. Run your own numbers below.
Pricing calculator
Enter your expected traffic. Power Pages is calculated at Microsoft list prices, using whichever of subscription packs or pay-as-you-go is cheaper for your numbers.
List prices in USD as published by Microsoft: authenticated users $200 per 100 users per site per month (or $4 pay-as-you-go), anonymous users $75 per 500 users per site per month (or $0.30 pay-as-you-go). Volume discounts exist at high pack counts; unused capacity does not roll over. A Dataverse environment is required on both sides and licensed separately, so it is excluded from the comparison. Estimates, not a quote.
Power Pages pricing, explained
The product is solid. The meter is the problem. Three licensing mechanics decide what you actually pay.
Every unique visitor in a calendar month consumes capacity: anonymous visitors in packs of 500 for $75, signed-in users in packs of 100 for $200. More marketing success means a bigger invoice for the same website.
Capacity is licensed per website. The same person visiting two of your sites consumes capacity on both, and whatever you do not use this month is gone. You size packs for your peak month and pay for it every month.
Skipping the pre-committed packs sounds flexible, but pay-as-you-go runs $0.30 per anonymous visitor and $4 per authenticated user. A single viral month can cost more than a year of ordinary hosting.
Side by side
Annual front-end cost for typical scenarios. Both sides use the Dataverse environment you already license.
| Scenario | Power Pages | WordPress + Dataverse Connect | Azure Static Web App |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public site, 2,000 visitors a month | $3,600 | $120 to $360 | $0 to $108 |
| Public site, 10,000 visitors a month | $18,000 | unchanged | unchanged |
| Public site, 50,000 visitors a month | $90,000 | unchanged | about $200 |
| Portal, 500 signed-in users | $12,000 | hosting + free auth tier | hosting + free auth tier |
| Portal, 2,000 signed-in users | $48,000 | unchanged | unchanged |
Volume tier discounts reduce the largest Power Pages numbers somewhat. The shape is the point: the portal cost is a line that climbs with traffic, the alternative is flat.
The honest part
The comparison is only fair if you name what you take over. Power Pages includes managed hosting and patching, DDoS protection, Microsoft support, and out-of-the-box Dataverse row-level security for signed-in users.
Authenticated portals where each user must see exactly their own records, enforced by Dataverse security itself, with no appetite for any custom auth work. If that is the core requirement and the user count is small, the meter can be worth it.
Public, anonymous-first websites: listings, directories, catalogs, application forms, career pages. You pay per visitor for a front end you do not fully control, while the same records could be served from hosting that costs less per year than one month of packs.
The alternative, concretely
Both routes talk to Dataverse through the official Web API with server-side credentials: an Entra ID app registration and an application user with least privilege. Nothing reaches the browser, and the records never leave your tenant.
Our plugin publishes Dataverse tables as lists and detail pages with clean slug URLs, and writes form submissions back as records. Runs in the WordPress your marketing team already owns. We run it in production ourselves.
About the pluginFor generated or custom-built sites: host the front end as a Static Web App from a few dollars a month, with a thin serverless API layer doing the Dataverse reads and writes. Ideal when the site is React or fully bespoke.
Talk architectureMigration assessment
If your organization runs a Power Pages site, we will inventory what it does, price the WordPress or Static Web App alternative against your real visitor numbers, and show you the migration path. If the numbers say stay, we will tell you that too.
Independent advice from WOODS Business Solutions. Dataverse and Power Pages are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation; we are not affiliated with Microsoft.