How was this ever nonfree? Automate is pretty good but it’s been built into MacOS for many years.

Microsoft pricing is hard to understand until it gets to bundled or free. Their cloud version is neat but I’m not sure I know the price. It could be $0 or $500/year and it wouldn’t surprise me.

I just looked it up [0] and it’s $15/month/user, or $40/month if I want RPA, or $500/month for 5 flows.

This is in addition to the azure fees for whatever you do in your flow.

I wonder who pays these amounts since basically it’s just an azure api composer. This is just software that should at most be a one time fee. I wonder who pays for this at scale.

For comparison Office365 including email and a terabyte of storage is only $100/year, almost half this price. This would be like if Microsoft charged $100/month to run cron jobs on your machine.

I expect automate cloud will be free soon.

[0] https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Power Automate Desktop require me to sign in even though its free. I don't expect much from MS but I'm still dissapointed.

I might give cracking with dnspy a go but I already have a pretty good desktop automation workflow going on with python

This frustrates me a little. I took two weeks developing on huginn. Because it was not free.

I’m glad it is now because power automate is more accessible for my work colleagues then huginn is.

How would this affect Uipath, Automationanywhere and other windows only RPA providers?

Now that RPA is pretty much free and part of the operating system, would companies still pay for RPA?

One concern with the MS option is that it's not their only product so they could drop or degrade it in the future without impacting their bottom line. The other RPA vendors are tied to their RPA products. The fact that it's going to be free makes it feel like they didn't get enough sales and so it's not worth pumping anymore.

So... Automator for Windows? That's great news!

How does this compares to AutoHotKey?