Salesforce wants to bill you for reading your own customer records and you should refuse

Jason Lemkin runs SaaStr with three humans and more than 21 agents. One of them, an AI revenue chief called 10K, makes 35,000 to 40,000 API calls a day against the company's software. For years nobody billed a cent for those calls. Now one estimate puts the cost of carrying on as before at up to $240,000 a year. I think buyers should read that number as a demand to pay twice for records they already own, and refuse it.

Look at how Salesforce is building the meter. According to a recent pricing breakdown from Supered, every successful call a registered agent makes over MCP or the API in a production org will count as a Headless Platform Interaction. The multiplier is still to be announced, with 30 days' notice promised. So customers are being asked to accept a meter before anyone has told them the rate. This sits on top of charges that already exist. On Service Cloud, G2 lists the Starter Suite at $25 a month, with API access only arriving at the pricier Enterprise Edition. Agentforce Flex Credits run $500 per 100,000, or $0.10 per action. You pay for the seats, you pay extra for the tier that unlocks the API, and soon you pay again each time a machine reads a contact record your own staff typed in.

I understand the motive. Lemkin says SaaStr has one API seat at Salesforce and has no need for 20 or 80. Multiply that across a customer base and the expansion revenue every seat vendor built its forecasts on starts to vanish. He points out that seat-only vendors such as Monday and HubSpot are still struggling even as the cloud index has climbed 18% this year. If I sat in a Salesforce finance meeting, I would want a new line item too. My sympathy ends where the line item lands on the customer for using the product they bought.

The vendors' best defence is load. Agents hammer shared infrastructure, and Atlassian says its new limits exist so short-lived spikes don't become prolonged outages for every other tenant. That is a fair case for rate limits, and Atlassian's version, a shared pool of 65,000 points per hour per app since 2 March, is a rationing scheme rather than a fee. Atlassian also says about 95% of apps never cross the global pool. If almost all traffic fits comfortably inside the limits, load cannot explain a per-call charge on everyone else. And a multiplier applied to every successful call has no visible link to server cost when, by Lemkin's account, the alternative his agent proposed was a $5 Postgres instance with no API limits.

The other defence is commercial. Price rises in B2B mostly stick, and Bending Spoons made a business of buying products like Evernote, doubling or tripling the price and keeping enough customers to come out ahead. That works when the people deciding whether to migrate are tired humans facing a six-month project. Agents feel no such fatigue. When Amelia on Lemkin's team had 10K track its own usage for a week, it reported that many calls could be cut, then offered to mirror the system of record into Postgres the same day. SaaStr has already walked away from Marketo after API limits left its agent with 10 to 20 minutes of access a day. Lemkin expects metered vendors to suffer the same fate more slowly. I suspect he is underestimating the speed once the agent is writing its own migration plan.

There is a catch, and Salesforce has already shown it. In July 2025 it changed the Slack API terms to prohibit bulk export, persistent copies, long-term data stores and use of the data in large language models. Glean warned its customers the change would end up "hampering your ability to use your data with your chosen enterprise AI platform." Salesforce framed it as reinforcing data safeguards. Whatever the motive, the effect was to outlaw exactly the mirror 10K proposed. I expect similar clauses to creep into CRM terms once mirroring becomes the standard answer to metering.

Buyers have more leverage than the renewal desk admits. Dharmesh Shah keeps arguing that HubSpot should not charge for general agent access, and HubSpot's current fees, such as $0.50 per resolved conversation, apply to its own agents. Aurasell's CEO and CTO told Lemkin that charging for agent access is the last thing they would do. Atlassian, Okta and Cloudflare are being rewarded by investors for being agent friendly.

So do what SaaStr did and log a week of your agents' calls before your next renewal. Then put a clause in the contract granting the right to bulk export and keep persistent copies of your records for any purpose, AI included, with agent access priced as a fixed term for the length of the deal. If the vendor will not sign it, build the Postgres mirror now, while the current terms still let you, and before that 30-day notice arrives.

Prompted by We Got a $240,000 Estimate for Agent API Access. Our Agent Suggested a $5 Postgres Instance., SaaStrAI.