Power Automate Disabling Infrequently Used Flow

Question

How can I prevent infrequently run flows from being automatically disabled?

I recently received an email about a flow I have that doesn't run very often with the following message:

We noticed that your flow has not run at all in the past 90 days. If it does not run it will be turned off in 7 days.

This is very inconvenient for me, but I can't find any documentation regarding this policy or how to disable it (if that's even possible).

Some possibly relevant details:

• We are using the Microsoft Power Automate Free license with Microsoft 365 E3

• This flow is part of a document approval process and doesn't make sense to have run periodically to avoid this apparent 90-day limit.

Has anyone else encountered this / has anyone had success disabling this feature?

Update 2021-02-19

My posting the to Power Automate forum has a few responses at this point, mostly just other users noting that they have the same problem. One user posted a link to a guide on creating a additional flow that re-enables the disabled flows. For my part, I decided not to pursue that painful workaround, and for now am just re-enabling them whenever I get an email that a flow was disabled.

Answer 1

Power Automate Free, Trial, Community and Microsoft 365 plan licences are now subject to expiry after 90 days, whereas a dedicated per-flow or per-user licence isn't subject to these limits.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/limits-and-config#expiration-limits

It looks like this is by design to help encourage you onto a paid plan for critical flows.

There are some workarounds involving using a separate scheduled Flow to automatically re-enable suspended flows. The approach the OP found is to have a flow loop through your environments and re-enable any flows it finds with a suspended status, and this is quite an involved-looking Flow with a lot of steps. I also found that some details appeared to be missing/left to guesswork to recreate the flow myself.

Another way which appears simpler is to create a Flow that triggers from the incoming warning email, parses out the environment and flow from the email itself, and re-enables the flow that way. If you try this one, note that there's a typo in the last lines before the end of the article, as both the environment and flow appear to have the same code (and shouldn't). One of the lines:

split(outputs('Compose_-_extract_url'),'/flows/')?[0]

should be

split(outputs('Compose_-_extract_url'),'/flows/')?[1]

Unfortunately due to some other issues I'm having, I've not been able to work out which is which. However, this Flow is only 3 steps long, and might be easy to put in place.