Salesforce switched to usage-based API pricing, and one customer's bill jumped 83% to $22,000 annually after cutting seats from ten to two but adding AI agents that hit the API a hundred times harder. Usage-based models can backfire when AI scales your consumption.
Salesforce just admitted it. Switching from per seat to usage pricing made customer spend go up 83%, Neil, 83%. So earlier we just talked about how Salesforce is going all in on APIs, CLIs, all these things, right? So Jason Lemkin, the SaaStr or the EchoSign guy, he said they reduced their seats from 10+ to 2 human seats and 1 API seat. And yet we now pay $22,000 a year, 83% up. From $12,000. Why? Our 20+ AI agents use Salesforce 100 times more than we did a year ago. So they're spending less on the seats, but they're spending way more on the API. Yeah.
