What types of Salesforce licences are there?

For internal users there are full licences such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, cheaper Platform licences for custom apps, and special licences such as Field Service Technician. External users get portal licences, and interfaces get integration licences without a user interface.

What can't a Salesforce Platform Starter user do?

Platform users work with accounts, contacts, reports and custom objects, but not with opportunities and most sales and service features. Platform Starter allows 10 custom objects, Platform Plus 110.

Do integrations need a full Salesforce licence?

Usually not. Enterprise, Unlimited and Performance Edition come with a limited number of free Salesforce Integration licences that only allow API access. More can be bought.

When is the best time to negotiate Salesforce licences?

Salesforce's fiscal year ends on 31 January. Near year end there is often room to add products from your own roadmap for a small premium, provided the company knows what it will need in two to three years.

Salesforce Licences: Does Everyone Need a Full One?

No, not every Salesforce user needs a full licence. Full licences such as Sales Cloud or Service Cloud are often offered to everyone by default, including users who only read data, approve records or work in one narrow process. There are cheaper Salesforce licences for these groups, and across a large user base the difference easily reaches six figures per year. The only question is whether someone checks what users actually do in the system before the contract is signed.

What Salesforce licences are there?

Salesforce sells licences per user. A user’s licence decides which objects and features they can see at all. For manufacturing companies these types matter, with list prices per user and month, billed annually (October 2026):

Licence	For whom	List price
Sales Cloud Core	Sales with leads, opportunities, forecasts	$195
Platform Plus	Internal users of custom apps, up to 110 custom objects	$100
Platform Starter	Internal users of custom apps, up to 10 custom objects	$25
Field Service Technician	Field technicians	$175
Service Portal Member	Customers in a self-service portal	$10 per member
Service Portal Login	Customers who rarely log in	$4 per login
Partner Relationship Management	Dealers and partners in a portal	$25 per member

The prices come from the Salesforce pages for Sales Cloud (opens in a new tab), Platform (opens in a new tab), Field Service (opens in a new tab), self-service portals (opens in a new tab) and partner portals (opens in a new tab). List prices are a starting point. The quote almost always differs.

Then there are interfaces. According to Salesforce Help (opens in a new tab), orgs on Enterprise, Unlimited and Performance Edition get a limited number of free Salesforce Integration licences. They allow API access only, no user interface. An interface to SAP therefore does not need a full licence, and it should not have one, because a technical user with a full licence usually has more rights than it needs.

Where do companies pay too much?

I have worked in pre-sales together with Salesforce and know quotes from both sides. One pattern I saw often: the quote counts the employees who are supposed to use Salesforce and gives all of them the same full licence. Three groups fall through the cracks:

Readers. Management, controlling or product management look at reports and dashboards but never edit an opportunity.
Approvers. Someone who only approves discounts, quotes or orders spends a few minutes a week in the system.
Users of one narrow process. A team that only uses a custom app, for example for complaints or internal requests, needs neither sales nor service features.

What they have in common: they do not use the main activities, or they only take on related work at the edges. An example from a field service project: at one client we created travel requests based on service appointments, as a custom object, and made them available to the technicians from there. The colleagues who handled the travel requests did not need a Field Service licence for that. They worked at a fraction of the cost of a full licence.

An example with list prices: 100 users who only read and approve. With Sales Cloud Core that is $195 per user and month, with Platform Starter $25. The difference is $170 per user and month, or $204,000 per year. Over a three-year contract that is more than $600,000.

With external users the mistake costs even more. Dealers or customers working on internal licences because a portal was supposed to come “later” cost many times a portal licence.

What can’t Platform licences do?

Platform licences have hard limits, and ignoring them breaks the contract:

No opportunities, no forecasts and hardly any sales or service features. Platform users work with accounts, contacts, reports and custom objects.
Few custom objects. Platform Starter allows 10, Platform Plus 110.
No rebuilding. According to Salesforce Ben (opens in a new tab), customers must pay for standard features if they copy them with custom development. A custom “opportunity light” for Platform users is therefore no way to save money.

Special licences have similar limits. According to the pricing page, Field Service Dispatcher and Technician licences may not be used for a contact centre or case management. A technician who also handles customer requests therefore needs Field Service Plus.

That is why the licence question belongs in the architecture. Whether an approval process can run on Platform licences depends on which objects it touches. If you build the process on opportunities, you have already made the licence decision.

How do I build a licence forecast?

A licence forecast answers which licence types a company needs and how many, today and in the coming years. This is how I approach it:

Group users by activity, not by department. An inside sales team that enters orders is a different group from a key account manager.
Record which objects each group reads and edits. That gives you the smallest licence that fits.
Estimate growth, such as new countries, new business units or a portal planned in two years.
Put it next to the quote. Where the quote differs, there is either a reason or a negotiation point.

In existing orgs the login history and recently edited records help. Users with a full licence who log in once a month are candidates for a different licence, or for none.

Timing matters too. Salesforce’s fiscal year (opens in a new tab) ends on 31 January. Near year end or during promotions there is often room to add products from the next two to three years of your own roadmap for a small premium. That only works if the company knows what to ask for.

When is the full licence still right?

Saving at any cost is wrong too. A full licence is right when a user works on leads, opportunities, cases or forecasts, even occasionally. It is also right when a group will clearly need more within a year. Changing licences in the middle of a contract costs negotiation time, and a process built around a licence that is too small costs maintenance.

The same trade-off applies to industry clouds. When Manufacturing Cloud pays off compared to Sales Cloud, for example, is its own make-or-buy question, which I describe under make-or-buy and licence forecasts. AI features add consumption credits, and there the business value comes first, as described in Agentforce: business value and data quality first.

Where should you start?

If a renewal or a new quote is coming up, take one hour for three questions: how many users with a full licence edited an opportunity or a case last quarter? Which external users work on internal licences today? Which interfaces run through a user with a full licence?

The answers show how much room the quote leaves. A full licence for everyone is the most convenient solution and rarely the cheapest. If a renewal or quote is coming up and you want an independent review, send me a message or read more about me.