topic Re: Free Edition Apps - Failed to create app service principal due to unexpected error. in Databricks Free Edition Help

Free Edition Apps - Failed to create app service principal due to unexpected error.

mcguiles — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:42:28 GMT

I'm trying to create an app within free edition, and I'm getting an error: "Compute error: Failed to create app service principal due to unexpected error."

No matter what I do I get the same error any time I try to create an app. Any framework. hello world app, validated other app from another workspace, always that error after only a few seconds.

I did look into identities in the workspace admin panel, and it does appear that it is creating the service principals for each app, so the error could be misleading. Even if it says "can't create service principal", it still is able to create one. Perhaps it's not getting connected to the right resources after so it's not getting recognized?

Any help on this would be appreciated.

Re: Free Edition Apps - Failed to create app service principal due to unexpected error.

szymon_dybczak — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:37:40 GMT

Hi @mcguiles ,

Weird issue. In my case I was able to create app on FreeEdition without any problem. Could you check at which region your workspace resides? I'm asking because not all regions are supported.

Also, if you haven't tried that yet you can try delete your app compute and start from scratch:

Re: Free Edition Apps - Failed to create app service principal due to unexpected error.

Ashwin_DSA — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:04:14 GMT

Hi @mcguiles,

I've checked this internally. From what you describe, you’re not doing anything wrong. This appears to be a platform issue with Databricks Apps on the Free Edition rather than a misconfiguration in your workspace.

When you create an app, Databricks automatically creates a dedicated service principal that the app uses as its identity. The fact that you can see a new service principal under Settings --> Identity & access --> Service principals each time you create an app means that part of the flow is succeeding. The "Failed to create app service principal due to unexpected error" message in the Apps UI is, therefore, misleading in this case.

In other environments, similar errors are usually caused by identity or service principal quotas being exceeded, and those show up with a clearer error message. The unexpected error message suggests it is an internal Apps / Free Edition issue rather than something you can fix in the workspace UI.

While there’s nothing obvious you can change in the Free Edition to resolve this today, you may want to consider cleaning up the extra service principals to help keep things tidy, but it typically doesn’t fix this specific failure pattern.

If you happen to have access to another Free Edition workspace (or can create one), it’s worth trying the same hello-world app there. If it works there but not in your current workspace, that strongly points to a workspace-specific backend issue. If it fails in the same way, that suggests a broader Free Edition / Apps problem that Databricks needs to fix on the platform side.

If you’re willing, please share (here or via DM):

Your Free Edition workspace URL or ID,
Cloud and region, and
An approximate timestamp of a recent failed app creation.

I can try to raise this internally so the engineering team can correlate your workspace with backend logs to track down the root cause. However, I can't guarantee how long this will take.

If this answer resolves your question, could you mark it as “Accept as Solution”? That helps other users quickly find the correct fix.