--- title: "A Power Automate bot costs 10× a seat: ₹12,480 vs ₹1,250 a month" summary: "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." url: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/role-rpa-interactions format: Note desk: "AI in the enterprise" published: 2025-12-16 facts_checked: 2026-09-30 author: TechBag (The TechBag Journal) tags: ["RPA","Power Automate","UiPath","automation","attended bots","unattended bots","pricing","GST","CERT-In","DPDP"] cover: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/covers/role-rpa-interactions.png --- # 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.* Note · AI in the enterprise · By TechBag · Published 2025-12-16 · Facts checked 2026-09-30 · Canonical: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/role-rpa-interactions 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. ## Attended 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] **Figure: 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)* Premium (attended, per user) ₹1,250 Process (unattended, per bot) ₹12,480 Hosted Process (per bot, with VM) ₹17,885 | | Value (₹) | | --- | --- | | Premium (attended, per user) | 1,250 | | Process (unattended, per bot) | 12,480 | | Hosted Process (per bot, with VM) | 17,885 | Source: Microsoft Power Automate pricing, India and US pages · as of 30 September 2026 · list prices; Microsoft says checkout shows the actual price Our view Our view: for customer-facing work, start attended. The agent on the phone stays in charge of the interaction and the bot does the copying between screens, which is where errors and handling time come from. Buy an unattended bot only for a queue that runs without a customer waiting, such as invoice matching or order entry from email, and only once you can show it busy for most of the day. ## What 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. ReportedWho prints a price Microsoft prints all three RPA tiers in rupees.[1] UiPath prints one: Basic, from US$25 a month, while Standard and Enterprise are quote-only and robots are sold separately.[4] Automation Anywhere’s pricing page did not resolve when we tried it, so we state no price for it. **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](https://www.thetechbag.com/browse/identity-access/privileged-access-management) covers the tools. How we did this Figures as of 30 September 2026 Prices are Microsoft’s list prices for Power Automate, read from its India (INR) and US (USD: US$15, US$150 and US$215) pricing pages, which carry no effective date. These are the tiers Microsoft has sold under these names since 2023. The 10× ratio is ₹12,480 ÷ ₹1,250. GST arithmetic is ours. UiPath’s plan structure is from its pricing page. The Deloitte figures are as reported from the 2017 survey; neither Deloitte’s article nor the PDF resolved when we tried, so they rest on secondary reports of it. Excluded: volume and enterprise-agreement discounts, process-mining add-ons, and AI-agent consumption pricing. Spotted an error? Write to us; corrections are published at the foot of the piece. Sources 1. [Microsoft, Power Automate pricing (India, INR)](https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/power-platform/products/power-automate/pricing) — vendor pricing page, undated 2. [Microsoft, Power Automate pricing (US, USD), footnote on unattended bots](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-automate/pricing) — vendor pricing page, undated 3. [Deloitte, The robots are ready. Are you? 3rd annual global robotics survey](https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/consulting/articles/the-robots-are-ready-are-you.html) — November 2017 Survey PDF no longer resolves; figures as reported from the survey. 4. [UiPath, pricing (Automation Cloud plans)](https://www.uipath.com/pricing) — vendor pricing page, undated 5. [CERT-In, Directions under section 70B(6) of the IT Act](https://www.cert-in.org.in/Directions70B.jsp) — 28 April 2022 6. [DPDP Rules 2025, commencement timeline](https://legismith.com/dpdp-rules-2025-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. Go deeper on TechBag - [Privileged access management guide](https://www.thetechbag.com/browse/identity-access/privileged-access-management) — where bot credentials belong: vaulted, rotated and logged - [CyberArk Secrets Manager (CyberArk is now Idira, part of Palo Alto Networks)](https://www.thetechbag.com/cyberark/cyberark-secrets-manager) — machine credentials for scripts, pipelines and RPA bots