Jukka has been hitting the nail on Power Pages costs with his posts lately, but I started to wonder if there are different usage scenarios, and, perhaps, there are situations when Power Pages can even be used for blogging?
Actually, the fact that we are seriously talking about it now means Power Pages have come a long way… but I digressed.
When thinking about blogging, you can’t help but bring up WordPress. And it’s a great product, I’ve been using it myself here, but:
- Are you blogging for fun, or are you blogging for “business”?
- If it’s the latter, how do you want to track your blog visitors, how do you want to follow up with them, what statistical data do you want to collect, and how do you want to analyze it?
Imagine you blog were integrated with Dataverse. You’d have no issues following up with the visitors, doing some data analyses in Power BI, configuring upsell options, and so on.
Which is where Power Pages would be integrated with Dataverse by definition, but, with the WordPress, you’d have to do some work, and, potentially, you’d have to maintain that integration moving forward.
Back to Jukka’s recent example, imagine 16 K unique visitors coming to your blog monthly which would cost you 1,011 EUR.
That would not be reasonable for a technology blog which is generating no income.
However, when it’s an income-generating blog with product upsell opportunities, and assuming it needs to source data from your Dataverse database / to store it there, you will likely need to involve a WordPress developer. Even if that developer is only needed for 2-3 days per month on an average to maintain the integrations and to keep resolving issues, the costs may start looking at least reasonable in comparison.
Also, upsell aside, you may start supporting your actual customers through the same blog, since $2 per month per authenticated user might also be reasonable given that everything is integrated with Dataverse / Power Platform. Again, it depends on what you are doing there, but there are lots of scenarios where $2 per month per client would be a fair price for not having to develop your own integrations.
And don’t forget that WordPress is a good tool, but there are plugins you often have to throw in, and the good ones are, usually, not free. For instance, do you want Mailchimp? For 16K contacts in the database, you’d probably have to pay $300+ per month, and, even then, you may find it somewhat hard to integrate Mailchimp with Power Platform in terms of sourcing data from Dataverse.
There are maintenance issues, too. I don’t even want to recall the troubles with my own blog when it got hacked a few months ago. You may have seen all the popups etc which kept coming up… until I moved this to a dockerized hosting behind a firewall etc. Doing this back then meant spending quite a bit of time which I could have saved with Power Pages, since, if there were such problems, I’d have raised them to Microsoft and they’d likely be resolved quickly.
So, perhaps, Power Pages have more to offer if you look behind those licensing costs? Definitely not in all cases, but, at least, under certain circumstances. But, to be fair, it’s all theoretical for me personally at the moment, since mine here is a technology blog with no upsell ?