The September Licensing Guides…

Microsoft published the September 2026 licensing guides for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot Studio. I pointed Claude at the PDFs and asked it to update the pricing catalog inside the D365 F&SCM Cost Estimator.

Surprisingly the overall pricing did not change at the estimate level, and it even had to overcome my original mistake of using a 13 month old Power Platform licensing guide.

What Changed

Dynamics 365 Headless Commerce reached general availability, and it brings two add-ons: Headless import and Headless orchestration. Each includes 30,000 retail transactions per month plus one Commerce Scale Unit (Cloud), with overage at 5,000 per month, enforced annually in aggregate.  This was incorporated into the estimator, however without a list price for now.

What I Learned

On a previous pass I fed the tool a Power Platform licensing guide I believed was a month old. It was 13 months old. The figures I used from it had not changed since, so no estimate I produced was wrong. That was actual luck, but at least we proved everything done was accurate.  Don’t make that mistake I did!

The mistake that cost the most was not the prices. I decided to rename the catalog from pricing.v2026-08.json to pricing.v2026-09.json so the verification date would be visible without diffing.

But that happened to cost a lot of time, because every file referencing the old name had to change with it: the app itself, three Cowork reference files, and the imports in the automated tests. One decision about a file name turned a single-file edit into a spread of changes and a longer test cycle.

Next update I plan to give the pricing file a generic name that anything can reference, and record the verification date in the data, where it belongs.

What the Update Cost

After all the updates, all 92 tests passed. Over two hours duration, although I wasn’t babysitting the process. On API credits instead of my subscription it would have run about $13.

The two hours were my fault. I ran the session in a mode that lets it edit files but not execute commands, and it needed to run MarkItDown to convert the PDFs to Markdown and then run the test suite. So it sat waiting on my approval. I was not watching it. Twice I came back to find 15 minutes gone on a click I owed it.  For the video below, I sped it up to like 50x to hide that fact, lol.

For $13 and almost none of my attention, that is still a trade I will take. But the deterministic half of this belongs in a Python script, and that is where it resides.

If you use the estimator

Prices load from the defaults, so open Settings, hit Set defaults, then create a new estimate and load your saved file. The tool is a single self-contained HTML file with no server and no telemetry: https://github.com/dodiggitydag/d365-cost-estimator

I built it to answer the total cost of ownership question, whether you are budgeting a new implementation or you are already ten years into Dynamics 365 and trying to work out what next year looks like with the AI and licensing changes… and where to push when the EA comes up for renewal.

See the video if you want the play by play and a quick demo of the update at the end!

https://youtu.be/jDCWY68HB8E

Have you tried it yet, and what did you think?