TL;DR – why Rayfin is the clear successor to Power Apps:
- Vibecoding is the future. You describe the app in plain language; GitHub Copilot writes the code. Hand-coding is on its way out.
- You don’t need to be a developer. I can’t write a line of TypeScript – yet I shipped a live, authenticated app into Fabric in minutes.
- Safe by design. Your app is locked inside your Fabric ecosystem: Entra identity, workspace governance, data in your own tenant.
- No per-seat tax. It runs on the Fabric capacity you already own – and hosting plus authentication are free.
- No ceiling, no lock-in. You get real, owned, portable code instead of a proprietary canvas artifact you can never export.
- The only open question isn’t if you’ll move off Power Apps – it’s when.
Let me say the quiet part out loud: the future is vibecoding. Soon, no one will write code by hand.
Not “fewer people.” Not “vibecoding only for prototypes.” No one. And to be clear: this isn’t vibecoding only for prototypes — it’s vibecoding for the real, production app you actually ship. You’ll describe what you want in plain language, an agent will write the code, and you’ll ship it. The keyboard-warrior phase of software – memorising syntax, fighting a proprietary formula language, googling error messages at midnight – is ending. And the funny thing is, the people who’ll benefit most aren’t developers at all. They’re the rest of us.
I know, because I’m one of them.
I can’t write a single line of TypeScript – and I shipped anyway
Here’s my confession as a data platform person: I am not a developer. I cannot write a single line of TypeScript, React, or anything that compiles. And yet, a couple days ago, I published a real, authenticated, data-backed web application into Microsoft Fabric – with nothing but GitHub Copilot and an idea. Minutes. Not hours. Not days.
That app was the IBCS Trainer – a little Jump & Run game that teaches IBCS rules by stomping on bad charts. Behind the silly premise sits something serious: it runs as a Rayfin app inside Fabric, it signs users in with their Entra identity, and it writes every play-through into a typed database that I can query with plain SQL afterwards. I didn’t stand up a database. I didn’t configure an App Service. I didn’t open a single infrastructure ticket. I described what I wanted, Copilot wrote it, and one command put it live next to my lakehouse. And a couple of minutes later I had three additional sample Rayfin apps from awesome Rayfin deployed.
If you’d told me a year ago that the non-coder in the room would ship a governed app faster than a Power Apps specialist could wire up a canvas – I’d have laughed. Today it’s completely normal.
So what is a Rayfin app?
Rayfin is a backend-as-a-service that lives inside Microsoft Fabric. You write a front-end (or let Copilot write it for you), and Rayfin provisions everything behind it: a real SQL database in Fabric, a typed data API, authentication, and static hosting – all as a Fabric item. One command, rayfin up, builds it and hands you a live URL.
The part that matters for people like me:
- Your app lives where your data lives. Fabric stops being “just reports and pipelines” and becomes a place you can host the things people actually click on.
- Governance comes for free. The app inherits your Fabric workspace permissions and Entra identity. Your IT and security teams already know how to govern it – there’s nothing new to approve.
- It’s genuinely fast to ship. Idea to authenticated, live, governed app in a single deploy command.
That’s the whole pitch, and it holds up.
Vibecoding beats learning the Power Apps UI
Now the spicy bit. People will say: “But Power Apps is for non-developers. Vibecoding still needs a coder.”
That’s backwards. Learning Power Apps is learning to code – just in a worse, proprietary language that’s useless everywhere else. You still have to master Power Fx formulas, delegation limits, connector quirks, the canvas property model, environments and solution layers. That’s a steep, single-vendor skill tree, and the moment you hit its ceiling, you’re stuck.
Vibecoding asks me to do the one thing I already do effortlessly: describe what I want.
“Build me a form to log site inspections with a photo and a date, and show me last week’s entries.” That sentence is easier than building the same thing on a canvas – no formulas, no delegation warnings, no connector configuration. The agent writes the code; I review the working result. And when I want to change it, I don’t go re-learn where a property hid in some designer two years ago. I just say: “add a status column and a filter for open items.” Maintenance is a conversation, not a re-certification.
Best of all, the skill I’m building – describing software – transfers everywhere. The hours someone spends mastering Power Fx buy them nothing outside Power Platform. That’s a dead-end investment in a world that’s moving to language as the interface.
Your app is locked safely in your Fabric ecosystem
Here’s the line that makes security teams relax instead of panic: your vibecoded application is fully safe, because it’s locked safely inside your Fabric ecosystem.
This isn’t a random web app deployed to who-knows-where. A Rayfin app is a Fabric item. That means:
- Identity is Entra, brokered by Fabric. Sign-in and sessions are handled by the platform, not by some hand-rolled auth you have to trust.
- Access is workspace permissions. The same governance model that protects your lakehouses and semantic models protects your app. No new perimeter, no shadow IT.
- The data stays in Fabric. Every write lands in a real Fabric SQL database in your tenant, under your capacity, inside your compliance boundary – queryable for Power BI like everything else you own.
So when a non-developer ships an app this way, it isn’t a liability hiding in a corner. It’s a first-class, governed citizen of your data estate. That’s the opposite of the classic low-code sprawl problem.
But what does it actually cost?
Fair question – and the answer is refreshingly boring, which is exactly what you want.
A Rayfin app runs on the Fabric capacity you already have. There’s no per-user license, no per-app license, no premium-connector tax. It simply draws Capacity Units (CUs) from your workspace, and you watch it in the Fabric Capacity Metrics app like any other workload. (Full pricing details on Microsoft Learn.)
Only three things consume capacity:
- SQL Database – compute for every query and write, plus storage for your tables. (For the nerds: one Fabric CU equals 0.383 SQL database vCores.)
- GraphQL API – the typed data layer your app calls. Billed at ten CUs per hour of request-and-response processing time – so you pay for actual usage, not for it sitting idle.
- OneLake storage – your built front-end (HTML, CSS, JS) when static hosting is on, plus the read/write operations to serve it.
And here’s the part Power Apps can’t match – what’s free:
- The app hosting service – API routing and the application backend. No charge.
- Authentication – Entra SSO sign-in and session management. No charge.
- Deployment – running
rayfin upitself costs nothing beyond the storage operations it triggers.
Read that again: hosting and authentication – the two things you’d normally pay a platform tax for – are included. If you already run Fabric, your app essentially rides along on capacity you’ve already bought. Compare that to stacking per-user Power Apps licenses on top of everything else, and the math gets uncomfortable for the incumbent very quickly.
When will you switch your Power Apps to Rayfin?
Here’s the whole argument on a single screen:
| Power Apps | Rayfin in Fabric | |
| How you build | Learn Power Fx + the canvas designer | Describe it; Copilot writes the code |
| Who can build | A trained maker | Anyone who can describe an app |
| Where it lives | A separate Power Platform environment | A Fabric item, right next to your data |
| Identity & governance | Separate environment and DLP setup | Entra + Fabric workspace permissions, built in |
| Pricing | Per-user / per-app licenses | Fabric capacity you already own — hosting + auth free |
| The code | Opaque, locked to the platform | Real, owned, portable code |
| Ceiling | Hit the wall and you’re stuck | Drop into the code — no ceiling |
So I’ll leave you with the question I keep asking colleagues: which of your apps no longer needs a canvas?
Because the trade-off that justified low-code is gone. You no longer give up control to get speed – vibecoding gives you both. You get real, owned, portable code instead of an opaque artifact. You get Fabric-grade governance instead of low-code sprawl. You get capacity-based pricing instead of a per-seat tax. And you get all of it without writing a line of code yourself.
I’m a reporting person who can’t code, and I shipped a governed app into Fabric in minutes. If I can do that, your next internal tool, data-entry front-end, or little team app doesn’t belong on a canvas anymore.
The future is vibecoding. The only question is which of your apps you’ll build differently from here on.
If you’re building on Fabric, take Rayfin for a spin. And if you want to see what a non-developer can actually ship with it, go stomp some pie charts in the IBCS Trainer – that whole game is a Rayfin app.
