Independent Analysis Disclosure
- This article is an independent analysis based solely on publicly available sources.
- The company discussed is not a ROIGENT client, and there is no advisory or service relationship of any kind.
- It has not been reviewed or approved by the company, and there is no sponsorship or partnership.
- The company’s actual decision-making rationale has not been made public. The interpretations here are inferences worked backwards from changes in the published pricing structure, not statements of fact.
- Pricing information reflects the official Salesforce pricing page (last checked 6 October 2026) and varies by date, region and contract terms. Please check official sources before making a purchasing decision.
01. How Conversation Pricing started
In October 2024, Salesforce launched its AI agent product, Agentforce, at $2 per conversation. However many steps the agent took inside a conversation, the price was the same. It was a textbook simple structure: easy to budget, easy for sales to explain.
The catch was that this unit could move independently of the value the customer received. Answering a one-line FAQ counted as one conversation. Handling a complex case over twenty back-and-forth turns also counted as one. Both cost the same.
The math from the customer’s side
50,000 conversations a year comes to $100,000. But if a large share of those 50,000 were questions a person could have handled in a minute, the customer can easily start to feel that the more they use it, the more they lose. Once that feeling sets in, they are more likely to cut usage than to expand it.
02. 2025 — per-action Flex Credits
In May 2025, Salesforce introduced a new model called Flex Credits. It moved the billing unit from conversations down to actions. Each thing the agent does — updating a record, summarising a case, answering a question — becomes a billable unit. In the same announcement it also introduced a per-user monthly license.
| Conversations | Flex Credits | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | 1 conversation | 1 action |
| Unit price | $2.00 | $0.10 (standard action, 20 credits) $0.15 (voice action, 30 credits) |
| Purchase model | Pay per conversation | $500 per 100,000 credits (pay-as-you-go and pre-commit options added in August 2025) |
| A 3–6 action interaction | $2.00 | $0.30 – $0.60 |
The old model was not retired. The $2 per conversation remained as an option, but only for customer-facing agents. That said, the Salesforce pricing page states that Flex Credits and Conversations are not supported together within one org. You have to pick one.
Salesforce explained the change with an analogy to paying people for work: just as what you pay a lawyer by the hour differs from what you give the neighbour’s kid to mow the lawn, the price should depend on how hard the job is.
03. 2026 — per-resolution billing, and credits bundled with seats
This year brought two more changes.
- June 2026 — per-resolution billing. The customer-support Help Agent is billed when it “resolves an issue end to end on its own.” If the customer asks for a human agent or leaves negative feedback, there is no charge. The pricing page lists $2 per resolution. Same $2, but what gets counted changed from ‘conversation’ to ‘resolution’.
- September 2026 — editions restructured. The Core ($195), Advanced ($395) and Max ($550, all per user per month) editions now include 500,000, 1,000,000 and 2,750,000 Flex Credits respectively. A fixed amount of usage billing is bundled inside the seat price.
| Date | What is counted | What the customer gains | What the customer takes on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024.10 | Conversations | A simple budget | A unit price unrelated to value |
| 2025.05 | Actions | Pay only for what you use | Harder cost forecasting |
| 2026.06 | Resolutions (support agent) | No outcome, no charge | How ‘resolved’ is judged |
| 2026.09 | Seats + included credits | Flat fee up to a set usage | Usage beyond the included amount |
04. Reading it from a pricing perspective
The unit moved toward value
Line up the four stages and a direction appears. Conversation → action → resolution: the counted unit moved closer to the outcome the customer actually gets. Easy work is cheap, hard work costs more, and no outcome means no charge. Once that holds, customers have less reason to feel they lose out by putting the agent on more of their work. It can be read as a structure that opens room for expansion.
Predictability was bundled back in
Per-action billing is granular, but hard to predict. Whether one support interaction ends in 3 actions or 30 is something you cannot know until you run it on real data. The pay-as-you-go and pre-commit payment options and usage monitoring of August 2025, and the ‘seat + included credits’ structure of September 2026, read as mechanisms to fill that gap. The sequence is: gain the link to value by slicing finer, then give predictability back by bundling.
There are also contract terms that are easy to miss. Credits do not roll over when the contract term ends, and they are consumed in development and test environments such as sandboxes too. That is why you should calculate annual consumption from your actual usage patterns before adopting.
What Salesforce changed was not so much the amount as the billing unit. It redefined what to count in order to set a price, and in the process the axis of pricing is shifting from ‘how much did you use’ to ‘what did you get’.
05. Where to look in your own company
You do not need Salesforce’s scale for the same questions to apply. If anything, the smaller you are, the cheaper it is to change your billing unit, and the easier it is to act. Check the four points below.
Users, transactions, capacity, time. When you first chose that unit, was there a reason behind it, or was it because a competitor did it that way?
Is it a structure where the more customers use, the more value they get and the more they pay? Or one where the more they use, the more they feel they are losing out?
Costs that are hard to predict sit in approval for a long time. Check whether a customer can work out their annual cost from your price list on their own, or whether you need mechanisms such as a cap or an included allowance.
Before raising or lowering the price, try changing how you count. With the same product and the same cost base, your revenue structure can come out different.
Is there a reason behind your billing unit?
Three minutes is enough. Check where your current pricing structure has room to improve.
Free pricing check →Official Sources
- Salesforce — Agentforce Pricing (checked 2026.10.06)
- Salesforce Newsroom — Flex Credits announcement (2025.05.15)
- Salesforce Blog — Flex Credits explained
- Salesforce Newsroom — pay-as-you-go and pre-commit payment options added (2025.08)
- Salesforce Newsroom — Help Agent per-resolution pricing (2026.06.25)
- Salesforce Newsroom — 2026 editions restructuring (2026.09.03)
Disclosure / Trademark Notice
Salesforce, Agentforce and Flex Credits are trademarks or registered trademarks of Salesforce, Inc. and its affiliates. Their use in this article is nominative fair use for identification purposes, and ROIGENT has no partnership, sponsorship or endorsement relationship with Salesforce.
This analysis is not a consulting project carried out by ROIGENT, and the company discussed is not a ROIGENT client. It is not intended to evaluate or make recommendations about any company’s decisions.