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Comment by cubecul | Hacker News Reader

There is a TON of money in Salesforce. I'm rolling it out at our company right now and it's mind-boggling how many associated costs there are when you want the Salesforce connector for your existing tools:

  * Data enrichment service plugging into Salesforce? Extra $10-20K/annually
  * NPS service piping responses in? Upgrade for an extra $8K
  * Preloading account data? There are like 5-10 sources you can have, each one with a different purpose, each one a potential $25K/annually
  * How about a note-taking app that lets you modify Salesforce fields in the app? Another $40/user/month
  * Hiring a consultant? $150-200/hr, and it'll take 100 hours to get it done

All that's on top of the $150/user/month Salesforce Enterprise list price

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yeah and good luck deciphering their licensing. I'm a SF consultant and SF called the CEO of my company and told him to tell me to stop "socializing pricing" with one of my clients.

It really pissed me off since I have a long and trusted relationship with this client, if i can't give her a ballpark on licensing costs for some feature portfolio then what good am i as a consultant? God, it still pisses me off to even think about.

Sounds like Salesforce just wants to extract the maximum in BS licensing possible from each client...

What company doesn't do their best to get customers to pay the full cost of their licenses?

Pay the full cost of a license is one thing...

hide details and nickle and dime (if 20/k/year is a dime) is another.

The main issue with garbage companies like Oracle and Salesforce isn't that they charge... or that they charge a lot...

It's that the REAL cost of using their garbage is hidden and obfuscated and difficult to pin down.

https://www.contactmonkey.com/blog/salesforce-pricing-hidden...

You are not playing this in a right way. It's not your job to know the prices.Tell them they need to contact Salesforce for tbis, however you could give some tips on how to negotiate a good deal.This way you'll keep both Salesforce and your client happy.

It's first and foremost a sales company, and that shows in the way they nickel and dime you for EVERYTHING. And by nickels and dimes, I mean thousands of dollars per month.

Sounds like a good business model, assuming it pays for itself.

I'm just imagining a powerpoint slide that says "Yes we'll screw you over; after all you're the customer!" and a bunch of salesbros around the conference table muttering "well they have a point there..."

Want a sandbox that's big enough to use as an actual integration/staging environment rather than just a little toy "Developer Hub"? 15% of your annual contract.

They did improve on this a couple of years ago by including some sandboxes with the standard tiers, but yeah, it's excessive.

And it is still quite expensive, though. I mean... having 25 little sandboxes, and a partial copy environment is just silly. I'd rather have one or two dev. environments and a full copy instead.

Want a high level of support? That's 30% of your annual contract.

Someone has to pay for that thing sticking out of San Francisco

Hey yeah, I worked for a SaaS company (about 100 people) about 15 years ago that was paying salesforce around $500k/yr. That said, it was probably worth it.

I've no experience with this area, but the $150 per user and month seem pretty high to me. How many people would typically need that kind of access? Only Sales, or even more parts of the company?

If you pay your sales guys $100k a year, $150 is nothing.

$150 * 12 months, but your point still stands.

The Oracle heritage is certainly showing in the pricing.

I don't have experience with many systems, but I'd assume the accounting departments need access, as well as customer success/tech support departments.

This is list price, though to be fair they throw discounts around pretty easily (we got 35% off for a 50-user purchase). All customer-facing teams and people needing to understand customers (marketing, for example) would have access.

For us: sales, account management, support, marketing, even some engineering need licenses.

It is the highest you'll get for an Enterprise Edition license as far as I know. You do get great discounts on large volumes, like some said. To give you an example: if you get, say, 500 licenses, you can probably upgrade them to Unlimited Edition (list price of USD300/user/mo) for almost no additional cost.

LinkedIn recruiter is God Tier on pricing - $800 a month for a product they don't really update. An amazing model.

I don't fully understand it but my company stores important customer support data (including issues and software changes) in Salesforce, and I as an engineer have no access to that information because the per user cost is too high.

I suspect that is more like "sales" users rather than customers/contacts/leads/etc.

Keep in mind there is a $25 per month Salesforce license that serves the needs of 80% of small businesses and nonprofits.

I mean SF isn't stupid -- their software is the tool for the people in your company that actually bring in revenue.

This is nearly a universal law in the sales world: products/services pitched to salespeople always 1) are expensive and 2) come with their own sales team who are slick and/or aggressive. I've seen it from sales training, to software and everything in-between.

TBF sales tools probably come under the most scrutiny at just about every company for price/value. Companies that sell tools to sales can get high margins but can't price themselves above their value.

What a weird sentence to write but at least in my experience with IT/engineering so much stuff ends up being bought that, although it's is usually nice, would never stand up to scrutiny if we had to justify business value.

I work at a large company (one listed on their homepage in my country) and IIRC we pay millions per year to Salesforce. It's an incredibly expensive product.

Have fun investigating backup solutions so that if the worst happens you still have your data ... mind bogglingly expensive.

And people said the same about SAP years ago. The challenges are no different...which basically boils down to integration and data (with the biggest exception being that there is no longer a whole "we need a whole project just to build the infrastructure that hosts the service").

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