Dataverse is not a line item. It arrives inside a Power Apps or Power Automate licence, brings its own capacity, and only becomes a separate bill when you outgrow that. Here is the whole picture in NZD for a NZ firm with under 20 staff, from Microsoft's NZ price list. Prices checked September 2026.
The short version: Dataverse costs NZ$32.40 per user per month before GST, because that is the Power Apps Premium licence it comes with. The first licence gives the tenant 10 GB of database space, each licence adds 250 MB, and most firms under 50 staff never fill it. If you do, extra database capacity is NZ$64.70 per GB per month. The number that matters is the per-user one: for 12 people it is NZ$4,665 a year, which is why the SharePoint-or-Dataverse question comes before any of this.
The licence that includes it
| Licence | NZD per user per month, before GST, paid yearly | Gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Power Apps Premium | NZ$32.40 | Build and run any number of apps on Dataverse, premium connectors, the gateway; 250 MB database and 2 GB file capacity accrued per licence |
| Power Apps Premium at 2,000+ seats | NZ$19.40 | Same, for a tier no small firm will reach |
| Power Automate Premium | NZ$24.30 | Flows against Dataverse and premium connectors for a user who does not open an app; 250 MB database and 2 GB file accrued |
| Power Automate Process | NZ$242.70 per flow or bot per month | A flow with no human owner; 50 MB database and 200 MB file accrued |
| Dataverse for Teams | $0 inside Microsoft 365 with Teams | 2 GB per team, about a million rows, apps that live inside Teams only |
| Dataverse database capacity add-on | NZ$64.70 per GB per month | Only when the accrued capacity runs out |
Source: Microsoft's NZ pricing pages for Power Apps and Power Automate, September 2026. A client-facing site on top of Dataverse is a separate per-site subscription (Power Pages). The pay-as-you-go alternative (USD 10 per active user per app per month, billed through Azure) is cheaper than Premium for anyone who uses one app, at about NZ$17 a month, and Premium wins from two apps. The per app plan came off general sale on 2 January 2026 and is back only through some CSP partners, so budget on Premium unless your partner says otherwise.
The capacity you already have
Capacity is pooled at the tenant, not per environment, and it comes in three kinds that do not trade against each other.
| Capacity | Tenant default (first subscription) | Per Premium user licence | What lives there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Database | 10 GB | +250 MB | Rows, columns, relationships, metadata. The one that matters |
| File | 20 GB | +2 GB | Attachments, images, files in file columns |
| Log | 2 GB | +0 | Audit history and plug-in traces |
Worked examples. A 5-person firm on Premium: 11.25 GB database, 30 GB file. A 12-person firm: 13 GB database, 44 GB file. A 20-person firm: 15 GB database, 60 GB file. Creating a second environment (a dev copy, which you should have) needs at least 1 GB free, and every environment's system tables take a few hundred megabytes before you add a row.
What 1 GB holds
Microsoft does not publish a rows-per-gigabyte figure because it depends on the columns. A working rule: a plain row with a few dozen text, number, date and lookup columns is one to two kilobytes, so 1 GB is roughly half a million to a million rows of a job register, client list or asset table. A 10-year-old Access database migrated in full is usually under 1 GB. Rows rarely fill it. What does: audit history left on for every column (that is log capacity, but it fills), multiline text columns holding pasted emails, and system tables in environments nobody uses. Attachments go to file capacity, which is four times bigger and cheaper to extend.
The five limits that actually bite a small firm
- The per-user licence, not the storage. NZ$32.40 a month per person who opens the app. Design around SharePoint lists where the data allows it.
- API requests per user per day. A Premium user gets 40,000 Power Platform requests a day; a Microsoft 365-only user gets 6,000. A flow that loops over a big list in the wrong way can hit that by lunchtime. Microsoft's own advice is to filter at the source.
- Delegation in canvas apps. Formulas Dataverse cannot delegate stop at 500 rows, or 2,000 with the setting raised. The data is all there; the app just stops looking. Test with the real row count.
- Text at 4,000 characters for a Text column, about a million for Multiline. The pasted-email column from the old system needs the latter.
- Dataverse for Teams at 2 GB and one million rows per team, with no premium connectors and fewer column types. Fine to start; plan the upgrade path before the register hits it.
Three scenarios, priced
| Firm | Licences | Capacity | Per year, before GST |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 people, job register and quotes on Dataverse, everyone uses the app | 6 x Power Apps Premium | 11.5 GB database, plenty | NZ$2,333 |
| 12 people, 4 use the app daily, 8 only get emails from flows | 4 x Power Apps Premium, flows owned by one of the four | 11 GB database | NZ$1,555 |
| 20 people, model-driven app for everyone, five years of history with attachments | 20 x Power Apps Premium | 15 GB database, 60 GB file; attachments in file capacity | NZ$7,776 |
The second row is the one people miss: the licence follows the person who opens the app or owns the flow, not the headcount. Eight staff who only receive an approval email or a Teams message from a flow need nothing beyond Microsoft 365.
Common questions
Can I buy Dataverse without Power Apps? No. Dataverse is included with Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 licences, and with Microsoft 365 as Dataverse for Teams. There is no standalone Dataverse SKU. The capacity add-on extends storage for a tenant that already has one of those licences.
Does a Dynamics 365 licence cover custom Dataverse tables? Within limits. Dynamics 365 licences include Dataverse use rights and let you extend the Dynamics app with custom tables in the same environment. A standalone Power App on its own tables, outside the Dynamics app, needs Power Apps Premium. If you already pay for Dynamics, ask before buying Premium.
What happens when I run out of capacity? Existing apps keep working. What stops is creating, copying or restoring environments until you free space or buy the add-on. Deleting an unused environment, trimming audit logs and moving attachments to file columns usually recovers more than a firm this size ever needs to buy.
Is there a cheaper way for occasional users? Pay-as-you-go through an Azure subscription bills USD 10 per person per app in the months they open it, about NZ$17, so for a single app it is cheaper than the NZ$32.40 licence even for daily users. Premium wins when someone uses two or more apps, or when you want the bill fixed in NZD.
Method
Licence prices are Microsoft's NZ list prices from microsoft.com/en-nz, ex GST, paid yearly. Capacity figures are from Microsoft Learn's Power Platform licensing FAQ and the Dataverse capacity documentation. Rows-per-gigabyte is a working estimate and labelled as one.
First published at https://kove.nz/dataverse-pricing-nz
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