Marketing automation platforms promise efficiency, personalization, and scale. For teams evaluating or using Microsoft Customer Insights, those promises are real. But there is a cost that often emerges only after implementation, once the platform is live and data begins to accumulate.
It is not the license fee.
It is the data.
More specifically, it is how much data you store, where that data lives, and whether your organization has intentionally planned for the long-term implications of those decisions.
The Promise vs. the Reality
Marketing automation is sold on outcomes: smarter targeting, automated journeys, actionable insight, and tighter alignment with sales. Those outcomes are achievable. What is discussed far less is the ongoing operational cost required to sustain them.
As platforms mature and integrations multiply, data tends to grow faster than governance, ownership, and forecasting. The result is not deception or hidden pricing. It is an organizational blind spot.
What Data Management Really Means
In practice, data management is not a one-time setup task. It is an ongoing operational discipline that includes:
- Maintaining clean contact and account records
- Managing behavioral and activity data across email, web, SMS, and forms
- Mapping and normalizing fields across systems
- Filtering duplicates, bots, and internal noise
- Managing consent, suppression, and compliance
- Living with historical data decisions that are rarely revisited
None of this appears on a pricing page. All of it directly affects accuracy, trust, and long-term cost.
Microsoft Customer Insights: Powerful, but Capacity-Driven
Microsoft Customer Insights is built on Dataverse and deeply integrated with the Power Platform. This architecture is powerful and well suited for organizations pursuing a centralized customer data platform (CDP) strategy.
It also introduces capacity-based economics that are often overlooked during evaluation.
There are two independent cost drivers:
- Profile capacity: How many people you store
- Dataverse storage capacity: How much data you retain over time
Most teams plan for profile growth. Far fewer forecast how quickly interaction data accumulates.
Scenario One: 10,000 Contacts (Monthly Interaction Model)
This scenario reflects a smaller or mid-market organization running consistent but reasonable marketing programs.
Assumptions:
- 10,000 contacts
- Weekly email campaigns
- Always-on web tracking
- Light automation and inbound forms
- Approximately 60,000–70,000 interactions per month
At this scale, Customer Insights operates comfortably from a technical standpoint. Profile limits are not exceeded, monthly interaction thresholds remain within safe-use limits, and Dataverse growth is modest.
However, pricing does not scale down with usage.
Customer Insights is tenant-priced, meaning organizations at this size typically pay approximately $12,000–$20,400 per year, depending on attach versus standalone licensing.
For many teams, this means paying enterprise CDP pricing to support relatively modest marketing execution.
Scenario Two: 500,000 Contacts (Data Growth Model)
Now consider a mid-to-large organization with half a million contacts and always-on marketing across email, web, forms, and automation.
Assumptions:
- 500,000 contacts
- Approximately 50 interactions per contact per year
- Approximately 25 million activity records annually
This is not an extreme use case. This is normal marketing at scale.
Customer Insights Licensing at 500,000 Contacts
The base Customer Insights license includes approximately 100,000 Unified People. At 500,000 contacts, profile limits are exceeded by roughly 400,000 profiles and additional Unified People capacity packs are required.
Based on partner-reported pricing ranges, this typically pushes licensing into approximately $44,000–$68,000 per year, before storage.
Licensing increases, but this is still not where the most significant cost emerges.
Where the Cost Is Often Overlooked: Dataverse Storage
Customer Insights writes marketing activity data into Dataverse. Each interaction record includes system metadata, indexing, and relationships. Even conservatively, a single activity record consumes approximately 1–2 KB of database storage.
At scale, this adds up quickly. At 500,000 contacts, 25 million activity records per year can drive roughly 35–40 GB of Dataverse database growth annually.
Most tenants exhaust their included Dataverse capacity early.
Additional Dataverse database capacity is typically purchased in GB increments, commonly around $40 per GB per month (varies by agreement).
That translates to approximately $15,000–$20,000 in additional storage cost in year one, compounding annually as activity data accumulates. Storage costs can rival or exceed platform licensing by year three if retention is not actively managed.
This is why Customer Insights often feels like it became expensive over time — not suddenly, but without clear ownership or forecasting.
emfluence and Power Platform: A Different Architectural Choice
The emfluence Marketing Platform integrates directly with Microsoft Dataverse, without middleware, ETL tools, or third-party sync layers.
More importantly, emfluence gives organizations explicit control over what data is written to Dataverse. Contacts, attributes, consent, and selected outcomes can be synchronized. Raw marketing activity — opens, clicks, page views — does not need to be stored in Dataverse to remain useful.
That activity data still powers segmentation, automation, journeys, scoring and reporting. It simply lives in the marketing platform rather than consuming CRM-grade storage.
This approach prioritizes marketing execution and cost predictability over treating Dataverse as a centralized behavioral event store.
emfluence Pricing at Both Scales
emfluence pricing is contact-based, not activity-based.
- 10,000 contacts: approximately $12,000 per year
- 500,000 contacts: approximately $30,000–$45,000 per year
Email volume, web activity, automation, reporting, and social publishing are included. As engagement increases, costs remain stable.
Choosing the Right Marketing Platform for Your Organization
When Customer Insights Is the Right Choice
Customer Insights is often the right platform when an organization is intentionally building a centralized CDP, expects to retain behavioral data natively in Dataverse, and has teams in place to manage long-term capacity, governance, and analytics. In those scenarios, higher storage consumption may be a deliberate and appropriate tradeoff.
When emfluence Is the Right Choice
emfluence is often the right choice when an organization’s primary goal is marketing execution, not building a centralized CDP.
This includes teams that:
- Want robust segmentation, journeys, automation, and personalization
- Need behavioral insight to drive messaging and next-best-action decisions
- Rely on Microsoft Dynamics and Power Platform, but do not want Dataverse to function as a high-volume behavioral event store
- Prefer predictable, contact-based pricing that does not scale with activity volume
- Want to minimize long-term storage growth, capacity planning, and infrastructure surprises
In these scenarios, emfluence allows teams to use rich behavioral data where it is most valuable — inside the marketing platform — while keeping Dataverse focused on customer records, consent, and outcomes. This is an intentional architectural choice that prioritizes usability, cost predictability, and speed to value.
Final Thought
The most expensive marketing automation platforms are rarely the ones with the highest subscription fees.
They are the ones where the cost of data growth is often overlooked until it becomes operationally unavoidable.
emfluence gives teams a choice — and that choice changes the long-term economics of marketing automation.
Not sure which approach fits your organization?
We’re happy to walk through real-world scenarios and tradeoffs based on your data volume, use cases, and growth plans. Schedule a demo with us today.
Looking for a partner and architecture perspective? Read the companion piece.
