Dataverse capacity calculator
Find out whether you are actually in overage, and what it costs to fix. This is the only calculator we know of that models Microsoft’s cross capacity-type borrowing rules — the reason a tenant with spare file storage can still be in deficit.
Your position
Take these from Power Platform admin center > Licensing > Dataverse. Entitlement is the prepaid total; consumption is combined Dataverse and finance and operations usage.
Database
$40/GB/moTable rows, metadata, relationships and search indexes. The expensive one, and the only type nothing else can cover.
File
$2/GB/moAttachments, notes and image columns. The cheap one, at a twentieth of the database rate.
Log
$10/GB/moAudit logs, plug-in trace logs and elastic tables. Usually the first to surprise people after auditing is switched on.
The rule that catches people out
Unused capacity flows one way only, from a higher-value type to a lower one. Spare database covers a log or a file shortfall. Spare log covers file. Nothing covers database, because it is the top of the chain. This is why a tenant sitting on 200 GB of unused file storage is still in deficit when it is 10 GB over on database, and why an audit-log blowout sometimes costs nothing at all — the database surplus quietly absorbs it.
One consequence worth knowing: because file capacity is a twentieth of the database rate, moving attachments out of the database is one of the highest leverage cleanups available to a Dataverse admin.
Where these numbers come from
Borrowing rules, overage enforcement, the 15% notification threshold and the 1 GB requirement for environment lifecycle operations come from Dataverse capacity-based storage details on Microsoft Learn.
Add-on prices are US list: $40 per GB per month for database, $10 for log and $2 for file, purchased in 1 GB increments.
Tenant defaults use the December 2025 values, with the April 2026 increase to base file capacity. Trial, developer, preview, support and Microsoft Teams environments do not count toward consumption; the default environment includes 3 GB database, 3 GB file and 1 GB log before it starts drawing on the pool.
Rates checked August 2026. Microsoft changes prices and entitlements; treat this as an estimate and confirm against your own agreement before you commit budget.
Common questions
- Why am I in overage when the admin center shows spare capacity?
- Because the spare is in a type that cannot lend. File capacity never covers a database or log shortfall — capacity only flows downhill, from database to log to file. Check each type separately rather than looking at a total.
- What is actually filling my database capacity?
- Usually one of four things: audit logs if auditing was switched on broadly, the DataverseSearch index if Dataverse search is indexing large text columns, attachments and notes on tables that predate the move to file storage, or an integration writing rows nobody ever reads. Consumption per table in the admin center will name the culprit in about a minute.
- Is it cheaper to buy capacity or to clean up?
- Database capacity is $40 per GB per month, so 100 GB of stale audit data is $48,000 a year of pure overhead. Long-term retention policies and bulk deletes usually pay for themselves within a month. File capacity at $2 per GB is often genuinely cheaper to just buy.
- Can I be blocked from creating an environment even though I am not in overage?
- Yes, and this catches teams mid-project. Environment lifecycle operations — create, copy, restore, recover, convert a trial — require at least 1 GB free in the underlying capacity type and ignore cross-capacity borrowing. Your tenant can look compliant and still refuse to make a sandbox.
- Do trial and developer environments count against capacity?
- No. Trial, preview, support, developer and Microsoft Teams environments all report as 0 GB and do not draw on the tenant pool. Only default, production and sandbox environments count.
Find the 40 gigabytes nobody remembers creating
Capacity problems are almost always inventory problems. Cartographer crawls every environment and lists what exists — tables, flows, apps, solutions — so you can tell deliberate data from the residue of an abandoned project.
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