Salesforce’s new editions end the add-on sale partners lived on

On 3 September Salesforce launched three new editions of its core applications: Core at $195 (£145) a user a month, Advanced at $395 (£295) and Max at $550 (£410). The release says every tier now includes Agentforce, Slack and Slackbot, embedded agentic analytics, data security and a Premier Success Plan, plus Flex Credits: 500,000 on Core, 1 million on Advanced and 2.75 million on Max. The release calls Enterprise and Unlimited legacy editions and leaves existing customers’ pricing on them unchanged. Agentforce 1 customers can move to Max at no extra cost, and new pricing for the industry editions follows later in the autumn.

Salesforce calls this simplification. For the partner it is a different event. The things a Salesforce reseller or consultancy has attached to a seat – the Agentforce license, the Slack upgrade, the analytics module, the premium support plan – are now inside the seat. There is nothing left to attach.

That is the argument of this column. When a vendor bundles its AI agent into every license, the add-on sale that partners lived on dies. The margin does not vanish; it moves, to consumption that the vendor meters and to services that the partner has to price properly, often for the first time. UK partners of every SaaS vendor should expect the same move and rebuild their pricing before it arrives.

The add-on has nowhere to go

Salesforce has been candid about why. On its second-quarter results call on 26 August, Miguel Milano, president and chief operating officer, told analysts: “Only 5% of the knowledge workers that use sales and service have agreed to the higher end editions. We get a 60 to 80% premium, so imagine.” Marc Benioff, chair and chief executive, said on the same call that the company was “still trapped in some ways in old per user pricing models”.

Put those two lines together and the editions explain themselves. Selling the premium tier one upgrade at a time reached 5% of the base. Putting that content into every tier and lifting the list price gets Salesforce there faster, and takes the partner out of the loop. Nobody earns a margin on an upgrade the customer no longer has to buy.

What is being bundled is not small. Salesforce’s results release of 26 August puts Agentforce annual recurring revenue above $1.5bn (£1.1bn), up more than 240% on the year, with Agentforce and Data 360 together at nearly $3.9bn (£2.9bn). Until now the route to that revenue ran through an upgrade or an add-on. From 3 September the entry ticket ships in the seat.

The credits are the real product

The Flex Credit is where the money goes next. Salesforce’s Agentforce pricing page lists credits at $500 per 100,000, or £400 on the UK price list, and says a standard Agentforce action costs 20 credits and a voice action 30. Do the arithmetic on the bundle. Core’s 500,000 credits, which the Sales Cloud pricing page counts per organization per year, buy 25,000 agent actions; across 100 users that is 250 each, about one a working day. Advanced’s 1 million credits buy 50,000 actions and Max’s 2.75 million buy 137,500. These are starter allowances, not a year’s supply for a business that has put an agent on its service desk.

Milano described what happens when the allowance runs out. Half of Agentforce bookings in the quarter came from “customers refilling the tank”, he said: “they consume, they use the flex credits, they want more, they raise their hand, we go there”. That is the sale that replaces the add-on. Usage the customer can see on a meter triggers it, the cycle is short and it is Salesforce’s own account team that goes there.

Partners should be clear about who owns that meter. The vendor sees the consumption first, prices the top-up and books the renewal. A partner gets a share only by managing the credits: forecasting the burn, deciding which processes are worth 20 credits an action and which are not, and turning up before the customer raises a hand.

Services carry the margin now

Which leaves services, and here the bundle is a gift if partners treat it as one. Every Core seat now comes with an agent, Slack and analytics that many customers will not have configured. The release’s headline says the editions bundle “everything businesses need for agentic transformation”. A purchase is not a deployment. Someone has to build the agents, connect the data, set the guardrails, train the users and watch the credit meter. That work is the only part of the deal the vendor cannot ship as a line on the price list.

So the rate card has to change. A UK Salesforce partner still quoting a margin on licenses is quoting on a shrinking base. Three lines hold value now: implementation, priced as a fixed fee per agent or per process; adoption, priced as a monthly managed service with usage targets; and credit management, priced against the spend the partner keeps under control. A partner that can show a customer it used 40% fewer credits for the same outcome has a service worth more than the credits.

None of this is particular to Salesforce. Every SaaS vendor with an agent to sell faces a version of the same 5% problem, an installed base that will not upgrade a seat at a time, and has the same answer: put the agent in every seat, lift the list price, meter the usage. Expect Microsoft, ServiceNow and the rest to follow at their own pace. A partner whose AI plan is reselling someone else’s add-on should assume it has a shelf life measured in quarters.

Vendors will sell the seat with the agent inside it. Partners will be paid for what happens after the seat is switched on, or they will not be paid at all.