Boxcurve Unity: Licensing & Prerequisites
This guide is for the IT buyer or administrator who needs to answer a single question before committing to Boxcurve Unity: what do I need, and what will it cost me in Microsoft licensing, before I can run it? It sets out the Microsoft licensing you must hold, the Dataverse capacity the application consumes, the environment and permissions you must have in place, and the separate Boxcurve subscription. It does not repeat the installation steps themselves, for those, see the Installation & Initial Setup guide.
Boxcurve Unity is an accountability-mapping application delivered as a Microsoft Power Platform solution. It is installed and run entirely inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant: your organisation provides and administers the Power Platform environment, and Boxcurve supplies the application and a tenant-keyed subscription.
Two separate costs
Running Boxcurve Unity involves two distinct licensing relationships: the Microsoft licensing your organisation already holds or must acquire for Power Platform, and a Boxcurve subscription for the application itself. Neither replaces the other. Both are required.
1. What you need at a glance
| Requirement | What it covers | Who provides it |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Power Platform licensing | Power Apps and/or Power Automate premium for each Unity user, because Unity uses Microsoft Dataverse, premium connectors and direct web (HTTP) calls. | Microsoft licensing held by your organisation. |
| Microsoft Dataverse capacity | Database capacity to hold Unity's projects, tasks, stakeholders, comments and change history. | Microsoft, against your tenant's Dataverse allocation. |
| A Power Platform environment with Dataverse | The environment the application is imported into and runs in. | Your organisation. |
| A System Administrator | A user holding the environment's System Administrator role to perform first-time installation. | Your organisation. |
| Microsoft 365 accounts and groups | User accounts for Unity users, and the Microsoft 365 groups used to drive roles and the services Unity connects to. | Your organisation. |
| A Boxcurve subscription | The Boxcurve licence/plan that the application checks against (tenant-keyed). | Boxcurve. |
Each of these is explained in the sections below.
2. Microsoft licensing you must hold (and why)
Boxcurve Unity is built on Microsoft Dataverse and automates its work through Power Automate cloud flows. Those flows use a combination of capabilities that Microsoft classifies as premium:
- Microsoft Dataverse, Unity stores all of its own records in custom Dataverse tables and reads and writes them through the Dataverse connector.
- Premium Microsoft connectors, including the Azure DevOps connector used to mirror tasks to a board.
- Direct web (HTTP) calls inside flows, Unity makes direct HTTP requests for its Boxcurve licensing check, for the optional monday.com import, and for retrieving task packs. The HTTP action is itself a premium capability.
The factual consequence for your licensing, stated plainly:
Premium Power Platform licensing is required
Because Unity depends on Dataverse, premium connectors and HTTP actions, every user who runs Boxcurve Unity must be covered by premium Power Platform licensing, Power Apps premium (per-user or per-app) and/or Power Automate premium, depending on how your organisation chooses to license. Standard or "seeded" Power Platform use rights that come with Microsoft 365 are not sufficient. This Microsoft licensing is separate from, and in addition to, any Boxcurve subscription.
Boxcurve does not define, resell or override Microsoft licensing, and the exact plan that fits your organisation depends on your user count and how you intend to deploy. Microsoft sets the current plans, use rights and prices; consult Microsoft's official guidance for authoritative, current detail rather than any figure quoted by a third party.
Microsoft licensing, authoritative source
Power Platform licensing, premium plans and what each plan includes are governed by Microsoft. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/pricing-billing-skus
This guide deliberately does not quote Microsoft prices, plan names or SKUs. Those change over time and are confirmed against Microsoft's published guidance and your own Microsoft agreement.
3. Microsoft Dataverse capacity
Boxcurve Unity creates its own custom Dataverse tables and stores your operational data in them, projects, tasks, stakeholders, comments, notifications, and a retained change history of who changed what and when. As your organisation uses Unity, this data consumes Microsoft Dataverse database capacity within your tenant.
You should account for Dataverse capacity as part of your sizing, alongside any other Dataverse workloads in the same tenant. The amount consumed depends on how many projects, tasks, stakeholders and how much change history your organisation accumulates over time; Boxcurve does not set or cap this.
Dataverse capacity, authoritative source
How Microsoft Dataverse capacity is measured, allocated and managed is governed by Microsoft. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/capacity-storage
4. Environment and permissions prerequisites
To install and run Boxcurve Unity your organisation needs the following in place before the import:
- A Microsoft Power Platform environment with Microsoft Dataverse provisioned. This is the environment the application and its tables live in.
- A user holding the environment's System Administrator role. First-time installation of Boxcurve Unity is gated to System Administrators: the application's first-time setup will only proceed for a user with that role, and presents a notice to anyone without it. Plan for at least one System Administrator to be available to carry out the install.
- Permission to import a solution and to create connections in that environment, held by your environment administrators.
- Microsoft 365 accounts for your Unity users, and the Microsoft 365 groups Unity uses to determine each user's role and to operate the services it connects to.
Unity connects to several Microsoft 365 services during operation (for example Outlook, Microsoft 365 Groups, Planner, Teams, OneDrive for Business and Azure DevOps). The connections for these, and how access is granted, are covered in the Installation & Initial Setup guide and the Integrations & Connections guide; the licensing point to carry from this guide is simply that the accounts used for those connections must themselves be appropriately licensed and permissioned within your tenant.
Identity, accounts and groups, authoritative source
User accounts, sign-in and Microsoft 365 group membership are managed in Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft 365. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/
5. The Boxcurve subscription
Separately from your Microsoft licensing, Boxcurve Unity is licensed by Boxcurve through a subscription. The application performs a tenant-keyed licensing check: when it starts, it contacts a Boxcurve licensing service and transmits your Microsoft tenant identifier (together with the environment identifier) so that Boxcurve can return the plan that applies to your organisation. The licence is therefore tied to your tenant.
Two practical points for buyers:
- The check fails open. If the Boxcurve licensing service cannot be reached, the application does not lock users out; access is governed by your stakeholder and role assignment rather than by the result of the licensing call. The licence result determines which premium capabilities are unlocked, not whether the application opens.
- What is transmitted. The licensing call identifies your tenant and environment and reports aggregate plan/usage information; it does not transmit your accountability-map content. The authoritative detail of what the call sends is in the Data Residency & Tenant Isolation guide.
Boxcurve subscription tiers and pricing, confirm with Boxcurve
Boxcurve Unity has a licence/plan concept, and the application recognises a plan returned for your tenant. However, the names, contents and prices of Boxcurve subscription tiers are commercial terms and are not authoritative in the application's source. Confirm the available tiers, what each includes, and pricing directly with Boxcurve as part of onboarding. Do not rely on any tier name or price quoted elsewhere.
6. Responsibilities split
| Area | Boxcurve provides | Your organisation is responsible for |
|---|---|---|
| The application | The Boxcurve Unity solution and a tenant-keyed subscription. | Acquiring the Boxcurve subscription and confirming the tier with Boxcurve. |
| Microsoft licensing | None | Holding premium Power Platform licensing for every Unity user. |
| Dataverse capacity | None | Providing and managing the Dataverse capacity Unity consumes. |
| Environment | None | Providing and administering a Power Platform environment with Dataverse. |
| Installation rights | The System Administrator install gate (a built-in safeguard). | Making a System Administrator available to perform the install. |
| Accounts and groups | None | Providing licensed Microsoft 365 accounts and the groups Unity relies on. |
Related guides
- Installation & Initial Setup, how the application is imported, connected and set up.
- Integrations & Connections, the connections and optional third-party integrations Unity uses.
- Data Residency & Tenant Isolation, what the licensing check transmits, in detail.
- Data Held & Handling, the data Unity stores in Dataverse.