Flexible Pricing is a Full Circle Moment for Salesforce

When Salesforce was founded 25 years ago, buying software was anything but flexible. Companies would purchase software outright and if their business needs changed or something better came along the next year: tough luck. Salesforce flipped that model on its head with the advent of software-as-a-service (SaaS). If the software no longer delivered value, customers could simply cancel their subscription. This aligned our success to that of our customers. It’s why customer success remains one of Salesforce’s key values to this day.

As the Salesforce ecosystem grew to support everything from service to integration — and now agentic AI — flexibility started to mean more than merely giving customers an out. With AI rapidly reshaping the world in often unpredictable ways, companies need the ability to easily shift IT spend from one area to another, and to more closely tie spend to usage and value.

That’s exactly what we’re rolling out with flexible pricing.    

An evolving conversation

Before digging into what’s new, let’s review how Agentforce pricing worked at the start. Agentforce launched last year with a metering model centered around “conversations.” Each conversation cost $2, regardless of the complexity of the task. Whether you’re asking an agent something as basic as what time a store opens, or to troubleshoot a complex mechanical problem based on multimodal sensor telemetry, it’s all the same $2. 

While the simplicity of static (or one-size-fits-all) pricing makes sense for certain repeatable use cases, it doesn’t scale for customers who want multiple use cases. To enable customers to scale more effectively, we’re adopting an approach that mirrors how we view work in the physical world. Much like you might pay a professional, like a lawyer $300/hour, but hire your neighbor’s teenager to mow your lawn for $30/hour, the amount you pay varies on the job to be done.

One scalable metric for any use case

Salesforce customers now have a new way to purchase Agentforce: the Flex Credit. Flex Credits introduce value-based pricing for both employee-facing and customer-facing agents. Rather than pricing per conversation, Flex Credits are priced per action, with metering determined by the number of actions taken. Actions are defined as the functions your agent executes on the platform to get information or perform tasks. 

So, how do you decide which metering model makes most sense for your use case? Let’s look at an example. 

Imagine an AI SDR agent gets an inquiry from a customer about the differences between two products. The agent answers with knowledge and sets up time for the customer to meet with their rep. With conversation-based billing, that interaction would cost $2, but with Flex Credits, this exchange could be executed in 3-6 actions at a cost of $0.30-$0.60.

As a basic unit of measurement, actions afford much more granularity than a conversation, making it easier to align Agentforce usage with ROI. Each action costs $0.10 and you only pay for what you use. This per-action pricing model scales with how you’re using Agentforce — simple tasks cost less and complex tasks cost more. 

If your interaction with Agentforce doesn’t require an action, there’s no charge.

Flexing into the future

Flex Credits can immediately be used to fund all Agentforce use cases. By shifting to a value-based pricing model, we hope to bring more clarity to your Agentforce spend. We’ve also heard from many of you that planning for Agentforce usage at scale across a large number of users can be difficult. Decisionmakers want to avoid overcommitment and buying excess Flex Credits. 

That’s why we are also introducing a new unlimited per-user, per-month license for your users in Sales, Customer Service, and Industries. These new license models provide uncapped use of Agentforce without the worry of sizing credits for usage that can vary across different user types or roles.  

At launch, Flex Credits will support Agentforce usage and we’ll continue adding Salesforce products and services to this framework over time. Eventually, Flex Credits will be compatible across all Salesforce usage-based products, so that pre-commitments in one area can seamlessly be shifted to another. 

Reach out to your AE to get started with flexible pricing and check out the Agentforce ROI calculator to learn more.