Microsoft retires Power Platform's free environments: Dataverse for Teams and the Power Apps Developer Plan

Two entries tonight, both from Microsoft’s official Important changes coming in Power Platform page. They land on the same nerve: the free, low-ceremony Power Platform tiers that individual makers and small teams use to build inside Teams or to learn on a personal sandbox.

Coming 15 Nov: Dataverse for Teams environments deprecated

Dataverse for Teams was the free, lightweight environment type — 2 GB, no direct API access, no custom connectors, desktop flows, or AI Builder — that Teams spins up the first time you build an app or agent in a channel. Microsoft is retiring it in phases. From 15 November 2026 you can’t create new Dataverse for Teams environments, and existing ones that aren’t upgraded to full Dataverse are suspended and then decommissioned on 30 October 2027, taking their apps, flows, agents, and data with them. (Microsoft’s own table lists the suspension date as 15 September 2026, earlier than the creation-end date; we record the dates exactly as published.) The fix is to upgrade each environment you still need to full Dataverse before 30 October 2027 — which keeps everything but requires Dataverse capacity and premium licenses — or export your work as a solution into another Dataverse environment. The team, its channels, chats, and files aren’t touched.

Coming 15 Nov: the free Power Apps Developer Plan loses its environment

The same page deprecates unmanaged developer environments, which includes the free personal environment the Power Apps Developer Plan creates when you sign up. From 15 November 2026, signing up for the Developer Plan no longer creates an environment, and you can’t make new unmanaged developer environments from Power Apps, the admin center, PowerShell, or the CLI. Existing unmanaged ones are suspended 15 December 2026 and deleted from 15 January 2027 — apps, flows, agents, Power Pages developer sites, and data all go. The developer environment type lives on, but only as a managed developer environment (one per user), and running apps there needs a premium license the Developer Plan doesn’t include. To keep an environment, convert it by enabling Managed Environments before 15 December (mind the licensing), or export your work as a solution. Managed environments — including the personal ones environment routing creates — aren’t affected.

The next few weeks on the board

Dates ahead, each verified against its primary source: OpenSSL 3.4 end of life and the Minimus shutdown (both 22 Oct), OpenAI’s GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 / o1 / o3 model removals (23 Oct), Kubernetes 1.34 end of life (27 Oct), Fitbit’s legacy Web API shutdown (30 Oct), Consul 1.22 end of life and OpenAI’s hosted Evals platform going read-only (both 31 Oct), then Alpine 3.21 end of life, OpenSSL 3.6 end of life, and the GitHub Actions macOS 14 runner retirement (all 1–2 Nov). Full board with live countdowns on the calendar.