AI pricing and contracts: seats, consumption, credits, and two meters

Agentforce is not one price. It is a stack of editions, entitlements, meters, and platform costs that only resolve into a number once you know which product you are buying. Here is how to work out which one you are looking at, and which question to ask next.

Core 500k, Advanced 1M, Max 2.75M Flex Credits (org pool, not per seat). Seat price is not the meter. Confirm which SKU and Flex line sit on your Order Form.

Salesforce documents AELA as a fixed-price, fixed-term agreement with unlimited access to covered consumption services and no usage-based billing. Scope is agreement-specific. Compare the flat fee to your Flex Credit and Conversation forecast before you treat unlimited as settled.

Salesforce documents seat-based and usage-based Coworker pricing in the same org. Seat CRM and optional Slack search can be unmetered for eligible authenticated users. Missing the user-based AI permission flips seats into credit burn. Guest and portal users stay on usage. Data 360 sources add their own meters.

Salesforce meters Agentforce Voice two ways: Voice Actions (30 Flex Credits) or Voice Minutes (60 per production minute). They are mutually exclusive on the Order Form. Break-even is action density versus talk time, not feature names. Telephony stays a separate line.

Salesforce sells Flex Credits as PayGo, Pre-Commit, and Pre-Purchase. Cash timing, commitment risk, and unused-credit expiry decide the Order Form, not agent features. Start on PayGo until Digital Wallet shows a stable baseline; Pre-Commit needs a named true-up floor; Pre-Purchase only when discount, cash, and no-rollover are accepted on one worksheet.

Foundations lists 200K Agentforce Flex Credits; another page says 450K shared with Data 360. Which burn number to plan against, and when you outgrow it.

AI vendors are moving off per-seat pricing and onto models that make your spend a variable you cannot forecast. Here is how each model actually behaves at scale, and the terms to fight for.

AIforce is Salesforce's live interface layer that brings CRM data, workflows, logic, and permissions to any AI interface. It sits on top of Data 360, Customer 360, and Agentforce. Claudeforce, Slackforce, and Agentforce Coworker are the first three surfaces. Open beta for Claudeforce is not GA; the product page is stale versus the Sep 15 announcement.

Koa is Salesforce's first CRM reasoning model for Agentforce, post-trained from NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super inside the Salesforce trust boundary. As of the Sep 15, 2026 press release it is available to select pilot customers only, with general availability expected winter 2026 in U.S. regions. It is a model-provider choice, not a new interface layer and not a Flex Credits usage type.

Digital Wallet alerts. It does not block. Salesforce says overages bill at contracted rates. Here is the RevOps control plane: Flow thresholds, named owners, and a written kill rule before production scale.

Salesforce's own August 18, 2026 post says the AI Usage Data Model provides token counts, not Flex Credits directly, and that Digital Wallet is the single source of truth for exact consumption, billing verification, and contractual overage calculations. Use the data model for near-real-time dashboards. Use Digital Wallet for the invoice.

A billed Help Agent resolution costs 400 Flex Credits at Salesforce list ($2). Escalation, negative feedback, or walk-away is not billed. Sandbox resolutions are 0 on the rate card. Data 360 and Agentforce actions stay unmetered during the Help Agent session.

Digital Wallet is org-level billing visibility, not BU chargeback. Tag actions and cohorts by cost center before scale, allocate month-end burn by tagged share, and name Finance for the journal entry and RevOps for the allocation table.

Flex Credits look granular until month-end. Credits expire, overages invoice in arrears at the contracted rate, and Digital Wallet still has no kill switch. Here is the RevOps forecast-and-close model before the invoice contradicts the pilot case.

Run the list-price arithmetic before the AE call. At Salesforce list, a standard action is $0.10 and a conversation is $2. Break-even is 20 standard actions. Below 20, Flex Credits win. Above 20, Conversations win. Org cannot mix models.

A1E/A4X burns Flex Credits only. Other SKUs still mix Einstein Requests. Ask which meter prompts hit before you build the forecast.

Sandbox is not free. Salesforce's Flex Credits Rate Card applies a sandbox multiplier to pre-production environments, including scratch orgs. Standard and custom actions bill 20 credits in production and 16 in sandbox. Voice actions bill 30 and 24.

Flex Credits are fungible across Agentforce and Data 360. Salesforce says you do not allocate upfront. Data work can burn the same pool your Agentforce forecast assumed was yours.

Yes. Salesforce meters headless consumption. Anthropic bills inference on a separate contract. Stokes said you cannot buy it on one piece of paper. Two meters, two owners, no invented Claudeforce seat price.

Claudeforce / Salesforce in Claude is open beta for all customers as of Dreamforce day 1 (Sep 15, 2026). Still no GA, no list price, dual-path with Agentforce. Four questions to put to the Salesforce AE in writing.

The Proof Gap is money spent on AI with nothing attributable behind it. Tools were bought, pilots ran, time savings were reported upward, and revenue still cannot be tied to any of it. The Revenue AI Report exists to close it.

The rollback rate is the share of organizations that have pulled a deployed AI agent back out of production over a governance failure. Published survey data puts it at 74 percent of enterprises.

Cost per sales-qualified lead by AI vendor category, compiled from panel-submitted spend and CRM-verified SQL counts. Methodology, schema, and CSV access. Free download, no signup, CC BY 4.0.

The Board AI Slide Pack: the five-slide template revenue leaders use to present AI impact to a board, built on the Proof Gap, the Reversal Ledger, and the Eight-Seat Read. Free download, no signup, CC BY 4.0.

L4 Orchestrated. Every AI call logged with cost, latency, prompt, output. Without this, you cannot scale agents responsibly.

L4 Orchestrated. Deal desk uses agent to summarize the deal, flag risks, suggest terms. Reduces approval cycle from days to hours.