Seats, Flex Credits, and all-you-can-eat contracts make for an 'anxiety-filled architecture'.
Nothing shows how Fortune 500 companies depend on Salesforce like a global outage lasting more than seven hours. The interruption struck during the second day of last week's Dreamforce conference, where the $40 billion-a-year SaaS vendor was pitching AIforce and a collection of AI products. The question now is how the company will charge for them.
AIforce illustrates why the per-user licensing model is becoming harder to sustain. Unveiled at Dreamforce, it uses Salesforce's Headless Toolkit to make the company's data, workflows, and business logic available through interfaces including Slack and Claude. When AI agents and APIs perform the work instead of named human users occupying seats, charging per user becomes a less natural fit.
Earlier this month, Bill Patterson, executive veep and general manager of CRM applications, told an investor webinar that Salesforce was devising "a new pricing structure that really aligns to the benefits that customers realize from this new technology."
Outcome-based pricing will not suit every use case, however. Patterson said that some agents operate across multiple disciplines, domains, and products. Salesforce is therefore also developing bundles and using Flex Credits to charge customers according to consumption.
The company is testing three ways to charge: conventional seat licenses, consumption through Flex Credits, and fees tied to outcomes.
Traditional annual commitments sit alongside Agentic Enterprise License Agreements and the newer Salesforce Commit.
Preet Takkar, PwC's global and US Salesforce leader, expects outcome-based pricing to become far more prevalent by 2030, although "it will take time."