Process and Hosted Process licences

What it does

Power Automate Process is a capacity licence allocated to a cloud flow or a machine rather than to a person. On a cloud flow it grants premium and custom connector rights plus a high action allowance regardless of who runs it; on a machine it becomes an unattended bot. Hosted Process is a superset that also provisions Microsoft-hosted machines.

Key facts

A Process licence must first be assigned to the environment, then allocated to a specific cloud flow or machine within it.
Allocated to a cloud flow, it grants standard, premium and custom connectors to unlimited users in the organisation and 250,000 actions per day. The flow must be in a solution.
Up to 10 Process licences can be stacked on one cloud flow, each adding another 250,000 actions per day. Microsoft's sizing method is actions per run multiplied by runs per day, divided by 250,000.
Allocated to a machine, it becomes an unattended bot entitling that machine to one unattended desktop flow run at a time. Concurrency means more bots. A machine's ceiling is the number of concurrent Windows sessions its OS supports.
A cloud flow targeting a machine that has unattended bots is automatically covered and gets 250,000 actions per day — but that inherited allowance is not stackable.
Hosted Process covers an individual hosted machine or a hosted machine group. Groups auto-scale, pulling hosted bots from an available pool and releasing them on scale-down, governed by max bots and committed bots settings.
Hosted Process can act as a Process licence, though Microsoft notes that superset behaviour and its admin centre setting aren't available yet, and advises ignoring Process overage that Hosted Process licences would cover.
Neither licence licenses a person. RPA developers still need Power Automate Premium to build and manage desktop flows in the portal, and a machine must be registered by a Premium user before a Process licence can make it unattended.
The legacy Unattended RPA add-on has been replaced by Process and upgraded to behave identically. The legacy Hosted RPA add-on was converted automatically into Hosted Process.

When to use / skip

Buy Process when the flow is a core back-end business process rather than something a person clicks — invoice processing, onboarding, reconciliation. It's also the right answer when a premium flow has many invokers, when guests are involved, when a service principal owns the flow, or when the daily action volume is beyond what a user entitlement covers. Skip it for flows a single owner runs on a schedule, where one Premium licence on that owner is cheaper and simpler. Hosted Process earns its place when the client doesn't want to manage RPA infrastructure at all; if they already have a managed VM estate, standard machines plus Process may be the better fit.

Configuration decisions

Whether the unit being licensed is a business process or a machine, since the counting method differs entirely.
How many concurrent unattended runs are actually needed, because that's the bot count and it drives the bill.
Whether machines auto-allocate bots at runtime or are allocated manually, noting auto-allocated bots stay allocated until someone manually releases them.
For hosted machine groups, the max bots and committed bots settings, which trade responsiveness against how hard the pool works.
Whether stacking is needed on high-volume flows, and which flows those are — the admin centre request reports show actual daily counts.

Gotchas

One Process licence covers a business process, and Microsoft's guidance says all cloud flows in one process are included — but the mechanics currently require each flow needing capacity to have a licence directly assigned. Child flows need their own licence with Allow process overage enabled. Flow groups and automatic inheritance from parent flows are planned, not shipped.
Each environment's flows are separate flows. A solution deployed to dev, test and production needs a Process licence in each environment where the flow needs the capacity.
Premium user licences are tenant-level, so unlike Process they don't need buying per environment. People conflate the two.
Capacity licences can't replace user licences. Creating automations, running desktop flows attended or unattended, and several monitoring pages in the portal are all restricted to licensed users.
Bots auto-allocated to a machine don't release themselves. If nobody deallocates, you're paying for idle capacity.

Consultant notes

Size Process on concurrency for RPA and on daily action volume for cloud flows. Those are two different conversations and mixing them produces a wrong number in both directions.
Flag the per-environment point explicitly in any programme with a proper dev/test/prod split. It's the most common gap in a Process-based estimate.
Warn that a Process licence doesn't remove the need for Premium licences for the RPA developers. Clients hear "licence the flow, not the user" and take it further than it goes.
Where the client has both Process overage and unused Hosted Process licences, check the current state of the superset behaviour before advising a purchase — Microsoft's own guidance is to ignore that overage for now.
Don't quote prices. Point at the Power Platform Licensing Guide and the client's account team.

Worth revisiting when flow groups and parent-to-child capacity inheritance ship, and when the Hosted Process superset setting reaches the admin centre.