Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: May 19, 2025
Salesforce announced Flex Credits, which provides customers with more flexibility via a consumption-based model that aligns AI cost with usage instead of a flat $2 per transaction model. According to Salesforce, Flex Credits ensures customers only pay for the exact actions Agentforce performs, with the number of Flex Credits corresponding to the complexity of the action taken.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Salesforce announced Flex Credits, a new pricing model for its AI offerings. This model allows customers to pay based on actual AI usage rather than a flat fee per transaction.
- This shift aims to meet customer demand for cost certainty and flexibility in deploying AI, potentially influencing competitors’ pricing strategies in the market.
- Salesforce will continue to let customers pay for AI based on its traditional model, ensuring that current customers looking for cost certainty are not left behind.
The News: In response to customer feedback and a continuing shift to agentic workflows, Salesforce announced a significant change to its pricing of its generative artificial intelligence (AI) offerings. The company announced new Flex Credits, which provides customers with more flexibility via a consumption-based model that aligns AI cost with usage, instead of a flat $2 per transaction model. According to Salesforce, Flex Credits ensures customers only pay for the exact actions Agentforce performs, with the number of Flex Credits corresponding to the complexity of the action taken.
Flex Credits are available in packs of 100,000 credits at a cost of $500, and let customers strategically allocate AI spend to align directly with high-value use cases, and enable them to proactively manage their supply of credits as new agents launch and AI adoption expands.
Salesforce also announced its new Flex Agreement option, which allows organizations to convert user licenses into Flex Credits or Flex Credits into new user licenses, providing them with flexibility to continuously adapt their AI investment strategies efficiently.
Salesforce’s new Agentforce user licenses and add-ons are designed to provide organizations with unlimited employee-facing agent usage via a per-user, per-month (PUPM) pricing model. This helps organizations that want to take advantage of the AI features integrated within Salesforce and Slack without worrying about running into usage caps.
Salesforce Announces Flex Credit Pricing
Analyst Take: Salesforce has been one of the most prominent industry voices in the software industry extolling the benefits of using AI agents to both augment and automate traditional workers and work. Its Agentforce platform has been one of the most visible examples of a large SaaS vendor leaning into the idea that work as it has been done today – largely by humans enacting manual processes across multiple tasks, departments, and systems – will be fundamentally changed by agentic AI.
Despite the lofty promises of an increasingly smart, automated workforce through agentic AI, enterprises have largely taken a more measured and pragmatic approach to incorporating the technology. Furthermore, some organizations have balked at the existing Agentforce pricing model, which saw each interaction priced at $2 (though with the possibility of volume discounts), which did not necessarily scale well, nor account for the increasing variability of tasks that agents are being expected to handle.
That’s why Salesforce’s reassessment of its pricing model makes a lot of sense. Organizations have typically wanted cost certainty and flexibility with respect to the pricing of software. Flexible pricing addresses those concerns, though it makes customers choose between the two options.
Indeed, Salesforce offers a no-contract, list-price pay-as-you-go model, which is targeted at organizations seeking to deploy agents at their own pace, which provides greater flexibility around agent deployment velocity and volume. For organizations seeking greater cost certainty, Salesforce also offers a pre-commit model, with a guaranteed specific annual usage commitment. Usage is billed via a consumption model, but if usage falls short of the dollar value commitment, the company is billed for the entire annual usage fee. However, this model also incorporates a discount off the typical list price in exchange for committing to an annual usage level.
Impact on Salesforce’s Competitors
Any time Salesforce makes a move around pricing or strategy, it will likely have some ripple effects in the market. Some competitors are building the price of generative AI functionality into their platform (such as Oracle) or are making it available within a specific product SKU (ServiceNow). Others, such as Zendesk, have taken this a step further by focusing on outcome-based pricing, and others, such as SAP, have applied a token-based approach to generative AI pricing with Joule.
It is likely that Salesforce’s double down on linking the cost of AI services to a specific interaction will cause competitors to at least think about how their pricing models are resonating with customers. Ultimately, enterprise customers will need to justify any additional costs that will be incurred through the use of AI, particularly as agentic AI use cases evolve from simple tasks to handling more complex, 24/7 workflows, which will vastly increase the volume and velocity of AI processing resources.
Ultimately, Salesforce has become a leading voice around agentic AI. As they shift gears around pricing, expect other vendors to respond, either by rolling out similar pricing structures or by taking a contrary approach to create greater differentiation.
What to Watch:
- The rapid evolution of the agentic AI market is unlikely to slow anytime soon, so it is entirely possible that the pricing models unveiled by Salesforce today may continue to evolve or shift, based on customer feedback.
- As the volume of AI workloads increases, customers may seek greater pricing discounts than what is currently available.
- While Salesforce has forcefully indicated it would not utilize outcome-based pricing (charging only for a successful resolution), they do use the term “outcome” in some of their marketing and positioning, reflecting the desire on the part of customers to closely link generative AI costs to successful business outcomes.
See the complete press release on Salesforce’s new pricing strategy on the company’s website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum:
Futurum: Salesforce Retains Leading Position in Marketing Automation Software
Will Tableau’s New Enhancements Excite Its Current Users and Prospects?
Agentic AI Platforms Powering the Next Era of Work for Enterprise – Executive Summary
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
