Agentforce now has three meters. Pick the one you can forecast, because you can’t run two in one org.

Salesforce’s Agentforce pricing page now lists three ways to pay for the same agents: $0.10 per action through Flex Credits, $2 per conversation, or $125 per user per month for unmetered employee use. The fine print says Flex Credits and Conversations “will not be supported in the same org,” so whichever meter you pick applies to the whole org for the contract term.

We think most teams should choose it the way they’d choose a forecast method, by asking which number they can actually predict.

What each meter charges for

Flex Credits cost $500 per 100,000. A standard action uses 20 credits ($0.10) and a voice action uses 30 ($0.15). Salesforce’s examples of an action are “updating a record, summarizing a complex case, answering a product inquiry, or executing a custom prompt or flow.”

Conversations cost $2 each and only apply to customer-facing agents.

The Sales, Service, and Field Service add-ons cost $125 per user per month and include unmetered use for employees. Industry add-ons are $150. Max Edition starts at $550 per user per month and comes with 2.75 million Flex Credits per org per year. There’s also a $5 per user license that requires Flex Credits, and a free Foundations tier for building agents.

The math that decides it

For customer-facing agents, a conversation has to use 20 actions at $0.10 before credits cost more than the $2 flat rate. An agent that looks up an order, checks a policy, and updates a case might use four or five actions, or about $0.50 in credits.

That makes credits look cheaper, but you only partly control the action count. Every flow step and prompt the agent calls is billable, so a builder who adds a summarization step to every conversation raises your unit cost. Your support or marketing team already forecasts conversations. You probably have no history at all for actions per conversation.

For reps, the seat add-on works as a ceiling. $125 a month buys the same as 1,250 standard actions, roughly 57 per working day. A rep who uses the agent lightly costs less on credits. One who has it draft every follow-up and update every opportunity probably costs more.

The fine print that changes the forecast

Unused Flex Credits “do not roll over into subsequent subscription terms.” Overages carry “no overage penalty” and are billed monthly in arrears. You can buy three ways: pre-purchase (pay upfront), pre-commit (a baseline with no upfront payment, listed as available later in the year), or PayGo.

So credits you overbuy are gone at the end of the term, and underbuying just means a later bill. That favors buying low and planning for overage, if your finance team will accept a variable line. If they want a fixed number, the seat add-on is the only option on the page that gives them one.

In September we argued that usage pricing moves the forecast problem to a new place. With Agentforce it lands on the buyer: whoever owns the Salesforce budget now has to forecast how the agents behave.

What about pay per resolution?

Let’s Data Science (August 31) and the Salesforce consultancy Ksolves report that a Help Agent priced at $2 per resolution became generally available in July. Ksolves says a resolution only counts when the agent handles the issue start to finish, the customer never asks for a human, and the customer doesn’t indicate they’re unhappy. The pricing page didn’t list it when we checked on October 28, and we haven’t confirmed the definition or terms with Salesforce, so we aren’t treating it as a fourth option yet.

What would change our mind

We’d stop favoring the predictable meter over the cheap one if early customers published actions-per-conversation data showing the number stays low and steady, say under 10 with little month-to-month change. We’d also revisit this if Salesforce allowed credits and conversations in the same org, or let unused credits roll over, since either would make a wrong guess cheaper.

If you run Agentforce, how many actions does a typical conversation or rep task use, and has that number moved since launch?