Introduction

Do you want to try out the Power Platform's premium capabilities without having to worry about licensing? Perhaps you're new to the Power Platform and want to test it out to see what it's capable of. Maybe you have the Power Platform but don't have access to a premium license, and you want to see what all the fuss is about with Dataverse and try out model-driven Power Apps or even create custom connectors and test out ALM capabilities.

In this post I will tell you all about the Power Apps Dev Plan as well as the new Dataverse Developer environments. The dev plan and Dataverse environments enable anyone to test out premium capabilities such as custom connectors, premium connectors, and custom connectors.

The Microsoft 365 Developer Program

To create a fully licensed dev environment that has Office 365 E5 licenses, Power BI, EMS, etc.. we need to start out with the Microsoft Developer Program.
Head over to: https://aka.ms/m365devprogram and click the "Join now" button.

Log in with your personal account.
Once you are in there you will get the option to create a "instant sandbox" or a "configurable sandbox".

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I would suggest to take the Instant one because the configurable sandbox will take quite some time to provision.

In the screen after that you will need to pick the region and choose a new admin username and password. Please remember these :)
Then lastly, add your phonenumber in the next screen to verify yourself

After it has been provisioned you'll see that it generated a tenant for you ("36jzt8.onmicrosoft.com in the picture below) and that your admin username is thus <username>@<newtenantname>.

This tenant has SharePoint, Outlook / email support, Power Automate support, etc! The tenant will be auto-renewed every 90 days if has been used at least once during that 90 days. You will not loose your apps or data that you store inside of this tenant when renewing.

Press the "Go to subscription" link and test if everything works!

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Tip: You can use "Profiles" in Edge or Chrome to keep your developer account logged in next to your normal account. This saves you a whole lot of logging in and out of accounts.

The Power Apps Dev Program

So now we got our own tenant set up, but what about the Power Apps Dev program?

To get a Power Apps Developer Plan head over to https://aka.ms/PowerAppsDevPlan

Press the "Get started for free" button and use your existing work or school email address to sign up. If you created the custom tenant from part one of this article, you should use that!

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This unfortunately can't be done with personal accounts. Your company can choose to disable this on their tenant. If so you will not be able to use that companies email address to sign up for this plan.

If your company is blocking it, or you just do not have access to a work or school account you should first set up the MS 365 Dev Program described in the first part of this article.

Fill in your country and business phonenumber in step two and then you are all set!

When you press the "Get started" button in step 3 the system will provision your licenses. This can take a minute but when done it will redirect you to the Make.PowerPlatform.com environment where you can start working on your amazing new projects.

More environments

If you want to fully test the Power Platform including things like Pipelines, ALM, migration solutions between environments, etc we should really have more than 1 environment.

The new Developer Plan actually allows us to do that.

Head over to the Admin.PowerPlatform.Microsoft.com website and go to "Environments" on the left. You'll see the first environment that was just provisioned with the type "Developer".

You can choose to create another (up to 3) premium developer environment by clicking "New" and picking "Developer" for the type of environment in the flyout.

Capacity

The new Power Apps Dev environments come with a 2GB data per environment limit. This is more than enough for development purposes.

Power Automate

Power Automate premium connectors are also included with your dev environment.

Head over to the https://make.powerautomate.com/ website and you can start building your cloud flows.

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With the dev plan only 750 runs per month are included. So keep that in mind because these can be gone really fast :)

Note that this will NOT include the RPA (desktop automation) licenses, AI builder credits, PVA (Power Virtual Agents) or any Dynamics 365 suite apps.

We will be able to use trial licenses (that can be renewed every 30 days) which we will be adding on top of the environments we created here.