Are Price Changes Coming for Salesforce Data Cloud? : Tom M
by: Tom M
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**Summary of Salesforce Data Cloud Pricing Changes** Salesforce, widely recognized for its traditional 'per seat' pricing, has introduced new, flexible consumption-based pricing models with its recent offerings, including Agentforce and Data Cloud. This shift aims to align costs more closely with business outcomes and improve user satisfaction. **Key Components of Data Cloud Pricing:** 1. **Consumption Credits**: Users purchase credits to perform actions in Data Cloud. The cost is $500 for 100,000 credits, which can be used flexibly across features. 2. **Data Storage**: A monthly fee charged per terabyte stored in Data Cloud, priced at $23 per terabyte. 3. **Premium Add-ons**: Additional features like Data Spaces and Data Cloud One can be purchased for advanced functionality, typically costing around $60,000 per year for standard offerings. To assist customers in managing their costs, Salesforce has implemented a **Data Cloud Pricing Calculator**, allowing users to estimate consumption. Furthermore, customers can monitor their usage through **Salesforce Digital Wallet**, which helps avoid unexpected charges by providing a monthly usage summary. **Recent Updates on Pricing Flexibility:** Salesforce has been vocal about creating more flexibility within its offerings. EVP Rahul Auradkar emphasized the importance of evolving pricing to suit customer needs, suggesting the potential for further changes. Minor updates already planned include: - Simplifying licensing and consumption models. - Merging some add-ons into the main Data Cloud service to enhance accessibility. - Adjustments to permission sets for better feature governance. **Final Thoughts:** Salesforce is actively responding to customer feedback by providing a more adaptable pricing model for its Data Cloud services. While the traditional pricing structure offered predictability, the new model introduces a more dynamic approach, reflecting changing market demands. As Salesforce continues to refine its offerings, businesses can expect further flexibility in how they use and pay for services. **Relevant Hashtags for SEO:** #Salesforce #DataCloud #PricingModel #FlexPricing #AI #ConsumptionBasedPricing #CloudServices #BusinessOutcomes #SalesforceUpdates #TechPricing
Salesforce has historically been known for its ‘per seat’ pricing model, but more recent offerings like Agentforce and Data Cloud have bucked this trend with consumption-based costs.
The cloud giant’s AI suite updated its pricing model earlier this year, introducing a new Flex Credit system, intended to align cost with business outcomes. While opinions are often mixed in the Salesforce ecosystem, the cloud giant did garner a fair amount of praise for this move, which went some way towards clarifying the ‘$2 per conversation’ model.
We caught up with Salesforce to find out whether similar changes would be coming to Data Cloud.
Data Cloud Pricing Explained
Three components determine how much Data Cloud costs:
- Consumption Credits: These are consumed when actions are performed in Data Cloud. Credits can be bought on an as-needed basis and are fungible across all features. It costs $500 for 100,000 credits.
- Data Storage: A monthly fee is charged for storing data in Data Cloud. It is calculated on a flat rate per terabyte.
- Premium Add-ons: Features like Data Spaces and Data Cloud One can be bought to enhance the functionality of Data Cloud. Prices vary depending on the add-on.
There is a fair amount of gray area here, but Salesforce offers a Data Cloud Pricing Calculator to help predict consumption and generate an estimate based on the usage of different features.
The Salesforce Digital Wallet helps customers monitor usage data for consumption-based products, such as Data Cloud, to avoid any unexpected charges when they review their Monthly Usage Summary, which is emailed to an account’s billing contact every month.
Data Cloud Storage Cards, which preserve information from multiple sources within Data Cloud, are charged at a rate of $23 per month for every terabyte of storage needed.
Customers can also purchase several add-ons to boost their Data Cloud functionality, including:
- Data Spaces ($60,000 per year): This enables data and process segregation and access control, meaning an enterprise that spans several brands and regions can retain a single instance while operationalizing based on brand/region.
- Data Cloud One ($60,000 per year for one connection): This enables a unified Data Cloud, which allows for integration and data sharing across multiple Salesforce orgs.
- Real-time Profiles ($750 for 10k profiles): This lets brands connect their enterprise data to real-time customer experiences across all Salesforce Clouds.
- Private Connect for Data Cloud ($600 per connection): This enables federated, bi-directional access between Data Cloud and customers’ private and public cloud networks, enhancing secure data transfers.
- Ad Audiences ($2,400 per year for one audience): This enables segments to advertising platforms.
Salesforce customers can try Data Cloud for free – but with a limited amount of storage and consumption credits.
Will Salesforce Change Data Cloud Pricing?
In late June, we spoke to EVP and GM of Unified Data Services, Data Cloud, and Einstein at Salesforce, Rahul Auradkar, about all things Data Cloud – and asked if there was any possibility of pricing changes coming.
He said: “I think the one biggest thing that we have already signalled – and we continue to evolve it – is the ability to provide flexibility to our customers.
“And when I say flexibility, we call it flex pricing. Today, we are frequently making updates to provide customers with flexibility. The credits you bought in Data Cloud can be used for anything. For example, credits can be used for streaming ingestion… it can be used for insights creation. It can be used for activation. So we have that flexibility.
“We continue to evolve the flexibility within Data Cloud. For example, making it easier for examples to be able to understand how they use the flexible options. That’s one thing we’re going to evolve.
“We have also signaled to the market that we will provide flexibility across our products, too. For example, I bought X dollars in a certain product – can I use it in another product? So, we’re calling it flexibility within Agentforce, within Data Cloud, but now across those products as well.
“So, definitely it’ll evolve in that direction… I just came out of a CIO customer advisory board earlier in the week in San Francisco, and that resonated really well with CIOs, and these are the top CIOs that we have on our advisory board. It resonated really well from the flexibility standpoint.”
So, ‘flexibility’ appears to be the watchword for Data Cloud – along with Agentforce.
While it’s important to stress that Rahul did not give us a definitive “yes” to coming price changes, talk of “evolving” the flexibility seems to imply that it is at least a possibility.
Recent Minor Changes to Data Cloud
In early August, a Salesforce Customer Success email sent to a Data Cloud user, seen by Salesforce Ben, explained that changes were being made to Data Cloud licenses, permission sets, and consumption cards.
The cloud giant said they were “simplifying” pricing and licensing to provide “greater flexibility” in how customers choose to use Data Cloud functionality and credits.
They also revealed they were rolling out new role-oriented permission sets.
According to the email, between August 21 and August 25, 2025, Salesforce will be making the following changes to orgs:
- Retiring the Segmentation and Activation add-on license and rolling its functionality into Data Cloud: Salesforce is updating Data Cloud licenses to provide access to segmentation, activation, and some related features.
- Eliminating Segmentation and Activation-specific consumption credits: Usage of segmentation and activation features now deducts credits from Data Services consumption cards, just like most other Data Cloud features.
- Merging Segmentation and Activation credits into Data Services credits: Salesforce will stop counting segmentation and activation usage on the Segmentation and Activation consumption card on August 21. By August 25, users will see both combined usage and combined credits reflected on the Data Services card. You’ll get one Data Services credit for every credit remaining on your Segmentation and Activation consumption card.
- Renaming the Data Cloud Admin permission set: After August 21, this permission set will be renamed to Data Cloud Architect to better reflect its role in Data Cloud. Access to Setup still requires users to have a Salesforce Admin role or the Customize Application permission.
- Replacing the Data Cloud Marketing Manager and Data Cloud Marketing Specialist permission sets: These existing permission sets will be marked Legacy. You can still use them, but they’re no longer being updated for new features. Salesforce is adding new permission sets that offer refined sets of functionality to replace them.
- Adding new Data Cloud standard permission sets for governing data and preparing it for AI: These permission sets grant access to specific subsets of Data Cloud functionality useful to these roles.
- Suspending invoicing for Data Cloud overages until November 3, 2025: Salesforce has suspended invoicing for Data Cloud overages across consumption credits, but customers are still responsible for monitoring their entitlements. You should have near-real-time insight via Digital Wallet into your account’s standing, and you can work with your Account Executive to add more credits as needed.
The changes will take place automatically between August 21 and August 25.
Salesforce strongly recommends reviewing the new permission sets and assigning them in place of existing permission sets where appropriate.
The new permission sets allow users to assign permissions in more “granular” groupings, giving Data Cloud users more control over who can access which feature while helping focus users on just the features they need to use.
These changes are somewhat minor, but nonetheless appear to be traveling in the direction of simplicity and flexibility.
Final Thoughts
If there’s one thing Salesforce wants to stress, it seems to be that they listen to their customers, and they want to give them a range of options to choose from. What suits one business may not suit another.
With Salesforce’s traditional pay-per-seat model, the flat rates offered somewhat mitigate the danger of a potential overspend, but there is still an element of uncertainty with consumption-based pricing.
With Agentforce, Salesforce has mitigated this with flexible options. Given the positive feedback surrounding this, it’s arguably not too far-fetched to imagine similar changes coming for other offerings.
The post Are Price Changes Coming for Salesforce Data Cloud? appeared first on Salesforce Ben.
August 25, 2025 at 02:30PM
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