DECISION FRAMEWORK · July 12, 2026 · 11 min read

InfoPath vs Power Apps: What Every Retirement Migration Path Actually Costs

If you're reading this, you've done the inventory. You know how many InfoPath forms your tenant has, roughly how many submissions each one holds, and which ones matter to the business. What's left is the hardest question: for each form, do we rebuild in Power Apps, or archive the historic data and move on?

This article is the framework we've seen consultants use when scoping InfoPath retirement projects in 2026. No sales pitch — if a form doesn't pass the rebuild bar, you should archive it and never look back. Here's how to draw that line.

The Two Real Options

Ignore the noise about "modern alternatives." For an active InfoPath form on July 15, 2026, only two paths exist:

• Rebuild in Power Apps. The form comes back to life on a new tech stack. Every future submission works. Historic submissions need a separate plan.
• Archive as PDF. Historic submissions are preserved forever in a universal, searchable, records-management-ready format. The form itself is retired; new business processes route elsewhere.

Everything else — Microsoft Forms, Nintex, third-party form builders — is a variation of the rebuild path. The core decision is: is this form still worth keeping alive?

What Rebuilding a Form in Power Apps Actually Costs

The Microsoft docs make Power Apps sound like "click a button, get a form." Real-world consulting engagements have a very different budget. Here's the honest breakdown per form:

Consulting time per form

A simple InfoPath form (10-15 fields, no branching logic, no attachments) rebuilds in Power Apps in 4 to 8 consulting hours. At market rates of CA$150-250/hr, that's CA$600 to CA$2,000 per form. A complex form — nested repeating sections, multiple views, calculated fields, workflow integration — is 30-60 hours. That's CA$4,500 to CA$15,000 per form.

Multiply by the number of forms in your tenant. Most tenants we see have between 8 and 40 InfoPath forms in active use. The rebuild bill for a mid-size tenant with 20 forms typically lands between CA$40,000 and CA$120,000.

Licensing costs you didn't budget for

InfoPath ran on your existing SharePoint license. Power Apps doesn't. Depending on the connectors your rebuilt form needs (Dataverse, premium HTTP connector, on-premises data gateway), you may need Power Apps per-app or per-user licensing on top of what you're already paying for M365.

• Power Apps per app: US$5/user/app/month
• Power Apps per user: US$20/user/month (unlimited apps)
• Dataverse capacity add-ons if your forms store meaningful data volume

For a 500-user tenant with 5 rebuilt forms on per-app licensing, that's roughly US$12,500/month recurring. Nobody wants to hear this the day before their InfoPath deadline, so plan the licensing conversation with finance now.

What historic data does the rebuild actually give you?

This is the trap. Power Apps gives you a working form for future submissions. It doesn't magically resurrect the last 15 years of InfoPath XML submissions. Those need a separate migration if you want them accessible in Power Apps — and that migration is a whole other project. In practice, most rebuild projects treat historic data as "read-only reference" (archive it as PDF anyway) and start Power Apps with a blank slate.

Which means: even the rebuild path usually includes an archival step for the historic XML. You're paying for both.

What Archiving a Form as PDFs Actually Costs

Compared to rebuild, archive is simple. Every submission becomes a searchable PDF. The form itself retires. Future business processes get whatever replaces it — a Power App, a Microsoft Form, an external SaaS, doesn't matter for the archived data.

Per-submission cost

MigrationFox's InfoPath PDF Archive is billed per submission converted. Current pricing:

• Pay-as-you-go: CA$0.15 per submission
• Volume (10,000+ submissions in one project): CA$0.10 per submission, on request

Real numbers: a form with 500 lifetime submissions costs CA$75. A form with 5,000 costs CA$750. A form with 50,000 costs CA$5,000 at volume pricing. Storage for the resulting PDFs uses your existing SharePoint / OneDrive / Azure Blob / file-share allocation — there's no per-file storage fee.

Consulting time

Effectively zero if you self-serve. The free preview tool lets you validate one form's PDF output in your browser without signup, so you know exactly what the output looks like before spending a dollar. From there, a bulk archive job typically completes in hours, not days, for even large form libraries.

A consultant doing the whole engagement (inventory, archive, sign-off) usually charges CA$3,000 to CA$8,000 flat regardless of form count. Compared to the rebuild path's CA$40k-120k, archive is 90-95% cheaper on a mid-size tenant.

The Break-Even Framework

Not every form deserves the same decision. Here's the four-quadrant framework we recommend to consultants:

The forms in your tenant almost certainly split roughly 80/20 — 80% belong in the archive-only path, 20% in rebuild. Consultants sometimes over-quote by proposing a rebuild for every form; ask them to justify each one against this matrix.

Worked Example: A 500-User Legal Firm

Illustrative math for a typical mid-size firm with 22 InfoPath forms accumulated since 2008:

Compare that to the "rebuild everything" quote a consultant might propose — 22 forms × CA$5,000 average = CA$110,000. The framework saves the firm roughly CA$78,000 without losing any data. The archive path also finishes in weeks, not the six months a full rebuild would take.

What to Do This Month

The July 14, 2026 deadline doesn't move. Here's the working sequence:

1. Inventory. List every InfoPath form library in your tenant. Note submission count, last-submitted date, and business owner.
2. Categorize. Apply the four-quadrant matrix above. Get business-owner sign-off on which quadrant each form falls into.
3. Preview. For any form flagged for archive, run the free preview against one submission. Confirm the PDF output meets records-management needs before scaling.
4. Archive first, rebuild second. Archive is the fast win. Rebuild takes months. Start archive jobs today so the historic data is safe; run rebuilds in parallel for the forms that need them.
5. Decommission. After July 14, remove any InfoPath libraries that have been archived. Storage cost isn't the problem — auditor discovery is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I just leave InfoPath forms in SharePoint after July 14?

The libraries stay. The forms don't render. XML submissions become opaque blobs no user can open. For audit or compliance purposes, this is worse than not having the data — you technically have it but can't produce it on request. Archive it as PDF or delete it; don't leave it in the "we'll deal with it later" pile.

Does MigrationFox rebuild forms in Power Apps too?

No — MigrationFox focuses on the archive path (XML to PDF at scale). For Power Apps rebuild, engage a Microsoft partner with Power Platform practice or your existing implementer. The two paths are complementary, not competing.

What about forms that have been used to store business rules, not just data?

Some InfoPath forms embed calculation logic or workflow triggers. Archive preserves the historic input+output pairs (the raw records), but the future logic needs a rebuild target. This is the case where rebuild is genuinely worth the money.

What's the fastest way to start?

Drop your .xsn template and one .xml submission at /infopath-preview. No signup. You'll see the exact PDF output within seconds. If it meets your records team's bar, scale from there. If it doesn't, you've spent zero dollars finding out.