Pricing and Limitation Considerations
Table of Contents
Overview
A premium Power Automate license which costs $15/user/month is required for the Process Subcontractor Form and Send PDFs Power Automate flow. Currently, the free tiers of Plumsail Public Forms and Adobe PDF Services API are being used. To maintain greater cost-effectiveness, it would be ideal to remain within the limitations of these free tiers. An Adobe Acrobat Pro license is also used to convert PDFs to Word Documents for template creation but is not needed for any other purpose in the context of this project and does not need to be a recurring expense.
Power Automate
As of Aug. 2023, a premium Power Automate license costs $15/user/month is required for the Process Subcontractor Form and Send PDFs Power Automate flow to use the Word Business (Online) and Adobe PDF Services API connectors.
Only one account with the Power Automate Premium is required. Currently, the TCIG@tcelect.net email has Power Automate Premium and is being used to maintain the Power Automate Flows used in this system.
Flows must be turned on to work, but you will get a warning after 90 days of inactivity that the flow will be shut off automatically if it is not run in the 30 days after the notification. As of 12/18/23, a flow to automatically turn on all required flows has been created. To turn on/off a flow manually:
Navigate to “My Flows” and click on the flow to turn on.
Click the “Turn On/Off” Button.
Alternatively, click the three dots from Step 1 and then the Turn On/Off button.
Plumsail Public Forms
As of Aug. 2023, Plumsail Public Forms offers several tiers to use its services as shown in the picture below:
The free tier allows 100 submissions/month and 100 Mb of file storage. The next tier is $12/month which allows for 1000 submissions/month and 1Gb of storage. Each submission takes up very little storage, so this will not be a worry, however the 100 submissions/month effectively limits this process form to be used up to a maximum of 50 times per month to stay within the free tier (1 from initialization, 1 for subcontractor form).
Adobe PDF Services API
As of Aug 2023, Adobe PDF Services API offers a free tier to use their Adobe PDF Services actions for 500 Document Transactions per month. The only other option is Enterprise Pricing, for which pricing details must be ascertained by contacting sales.
It is possible to check the current amount of Document Transactions used by logging to the account being used to access the Adobe PDF Services Connector and generating a report.
Login and navigate to the site: https://acrobatservices.adobe.com/dc-integration-creation-app-cdn/main.html?api=pdf-services-api
Click on the “Check usage” button in the top right.
Select the period and client ID to check usage for and click on the “Generate Report” button.
Staying on the free tier for Adobe PDF Services API requires that ths flow only be used up to a maximum of 250 times using one free connection.
Adobe Acrobat Pro
An Adobe Acrobat Pro license is also used to convert PDFs to Word Documents for template creationA yearly license costs $19.99/mo and on a monthly basis it is $29.99. Since it is only used for that purpose, an Adobe Acrobat Pro license is not necessarily a monthly expense in the context of this project.