A Power Automate bot costs 10× a seat: ₹12,480 vs ₹1,250 a month
Microsoft's India list prices for attended and unattended RPA, per user or per bot per month, and what the gap means for customer-facing automation, September 2026.
An unattended Power Automate bot lists at ₹12,480 a month in India; the attended seat that lets one employee run bots on their own desktop lists at ₹1,250.1 That 10× gap is the most useful answer to the question our 2023 post asked, which was what role robotic process automation plays in a business’s interactions with customers. The price decides the role. A bot that sits beside a person helping them through a customer call is cheap. A bot that works the queue on its own, overnight, is a licence that has to earn its keep.
01Attended bots help a person; unattended bots replace a shift
Microsoft sells three tiers. Premium is per user and includes attended desktop flows: the bot runs on the employee’s own machine while they work, filling the order screen or pulling the customer record into the CRM. Process is per bot and runs unattended flows with nobody logged in. Hosted Process adds a Microsoft-hosted virtual machine for the bot to run on.1 A footnote on the price page carries the constraint that matters: one bot runs one unattended flow at a time, so concurrent work needs more bots.2
An unattended bot costs ten attended seats before it automates anything
Power Automate list price in India, ₹ per month on annual billing, GST extra; per user (Premium) or per bot (Process, Hosted Process)
Source: Microsoft Power Automate pricing, India and US pages · as of 30 September 2026 · list prices; Microsoft says checkout shows the actual price
02What the 2023 version got wrong
The original quoted three case studies, a cable company, a CRM vendor and an audit firm, with time savings of 20%, 10% and 50%. We could not trace any of them to a published source, so they are gone. Its opening statistic, that 53% of organisations had started using RPA and 19% more planned to within two years, is real but comes from a Deloitte survey of just over 400 respondents published in November 2017.3 It describes a market nine years ago.
In India. Microsoft’s India page prints rupee prices with “GST extra as applicable”, so one unattended bot is ₹1,49,760 a year before 18% GST and about ₹1,76,717 after it.1 UiPath quotes in USD; budget the reseller’s INR quote plus 18% GST. Every bot holds credentials to the systems it touches. CERT-In’s Directions of 28 April 2022 require incidents to be reported within six hours and logs kept for 180 days, bot activity included.5 Where a bot moves customer records, the DPDP Rules notified on 13 November 2025 apply, with the security-safeguard duties in force from 13 May 2027.6 Put bot credentials in a vault; our privileged access guide covers the tools.
Sources
- Microsoft, Power Automate pricing (India, INR) — vendor pricing page, undated
- Microsoft, Power Automate pricing (US, USD), footnote on unattended bots — vendor pricing page, undated
- Deloitte, The robots are ready. Are you? 3rd annual global robotics survey — November 2017 Survey PDF no longer resolves; figures as reported from the survey.
- UiPath, pricing (Automation Cloud plans) — vendor pricing page, undated
- CERT-In, Directions under section 70B(6) of the IT Act — 28 April 2022
- DPDP Rules 2025, commencement timeline — notified 13 November 2025
Disclosure. TechBag is a software reseller: it earns a margin when a reader buys through it, including from vendors named here. The analysis is TechBag’s own; no vendor paid for or saw this piece before publication. Facts are labelled reported, TechBag count or our view.
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