The mounting confusion over Salesforce’s recent changes to agentic billing and pricing has reached the Mothership, amid discussions surrounding the company’s decision to charge for agentic MCP and API calls.
Amnon Kruvi, a Salesforce Architect and founder, told SF Ben about his experience with Salesforce directly reaching out to him about the ongoing issue, and what the company has planned next.
The New Pricing Response
Kruvi, who has been in the Salesforce ecosystem for 13 years and owns both a Salesforce ISV and SI, took to LinkedIn last month to share his concerns over the company’s decision to charge Flex Credits for agentic MCP and API calls.
“They finally did it – #Salesforce fired the silver bullet at their own foot that will mean their death,” he wrote. “Of all the stupid things they’ve done this past year (and there were many), mark my words: this is their death knell.”
This new decision means that any external AI agents interacting with Salesforce will need to be registered on the platform. Each agent will receive its own credentials and permissions, and usage will be tracked through the Digital Wallet. Every successful call made by that agent to Salesforce – whether through MCP or directly through an API – will be counted as a “Headless Platform Interaction” and consume Flex Credits. This means that the new model applies to direct API access where the traffic is classed as agentic.
Kruvi argued that customers are “primed to use AI” but will not want to pay per action, especially as they’re already being billed heavily per seat. He explained that in his mind, by doing this, Salesforce had “locked away three years of progress on the platform” and that the consequences felt across the community would be “real”.
His initial post gained considerable traction, with many ecosystem members echoing his sentiments. “This seems like a real misfire by Salesforce,” MVP Tom Bassett wrote. “Who else in the market is charging for MCP Usage or Agentic API usage?”
“This is the part that worries me most too… not simply the cost but what it does to the freedom to build around Salesforce,” Chirag Jain, the CEO of Cloudzzure Technologies, wrote.
Others, like Pablo Gonzalez, CEO of dX0, took the news in a slightly different light.
“These are just words on a screen,” he wrote. “Salesforce doesn’t have the resources to enforce this at scale. It’ll likely be backtracked or heavily changed. I’m not worried.”
Salesforce Listens In
After the very public reaction on LinkedIn, Kruvi came back a week later to share that Salesforce had actually reached out to him to discuss the concerns around agentic billing and pricing.
“Salesforce took a tremendous step,” he wrote. “The call was with relevant, key stakeholders who have the ability to set the direction the platform takes.”
In talks with SF Ben, Kruvi explained that he wasn’t expecting that reaction at all.
“I’ll be frank, I was really surprised when Salesforce actually reached out and said, you know what, let’s discuss this,” he said. “[And] I’m not talking about product managers – it was much more senior individuals in the business.”
Although he was not able to name any specific individuals, Kruvi explained that the discussions were being taken forward.
“AI Needs to Want to Work on That Platform”
Kruvi detailed that the three main cruxes communicated to Salesforce were the possibility of more predictable pricing models for AI agents, justifying agentic pricing by adding new, genuine value-adds from the platform rather than plain MCP, and looking into how customers and partners can continue to leverage AI to configure and support Salesforce orgs. Much of this was supported by the shared thoughts of customers and the community, he added.
“Usage-based pricing is understandable, but it’s not going to draw customers in,” he told SF Ben. “It’s going to scare businesses away just because they need to tell their CFO how much this is going to cost us.”
He explained that at the heart of it, it didn’t actually matter what the final pricing or Flex Credit multiplier was, and that the real problem was any sense of “friction” against an LLM or agent.
“If Salesforce wants to be the platform that’s recommended moving forward, then an AI needs to want to work on that platform,” he said. “If an AI feels that it’s being billed every time it performs any kind of action… the inevitable result is that it’s going to be performing fewer actions.”
“[That could be] by cleverly combining multiple actions into one or by doing something AI does really well – building alternatives.”
This also presents an undeniable security concern, especially as customers try to find workarounds for the additional pricing.
“Customers are savvy,” he said. “If anyone wants to badly enough, then they will start poking holes in the MSA and try to come up with their own creative solutions.”
Give Customers Control
Like many other ecosystem members who spoke out on this issue, Kruvi surmised that Salesforce would make a step in the right direction if it allowed customers more choice on the matter.
“I think the announcement itself was done right,” he admitted. “They’re giving people time to prepare.”
“[However], implementation partners and admins are using Claude more and more to set up Salesforce environments. If suddenly that came at an additional cost, then someone will have to pay for it. A lot of the setup that people do still happens in production.”
“If you are confident that what you’re giving is valuable, then let customers make the choice of whether they want to buy that particular product or if they want to continue to use the existing APIs.”
He also highlighted the importance of ensuring that applications sold through the AppExchange as official partners have some window of control over their own billing on the platform.
Final Thoughts: What Happens Now?
It’s clear that this conversation is very much still ongoing, and as Amnon Kruvi wrote on LinkedIn: “We did not get to resolving everything just yet, [but] I will say that we are on the right path.”
The hope is that through this particular customer-to-platform conversation, Salesforce has understood the continued importance of collaboration when it comes to making pricing and product decisions. Because the community that lifts you up can also quickly become the community that watches you fall down.
