Is Salesforce free? What it actually costs in 2026
No free tier. It is a paid product.
Per user per month, billed annually. Starter is about $25, Professional about $100, Enterprise about $175 and Unlimited about $350 — and the published number is rarely the final one. Sandboxes, additional API calls, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and integration middleware are separate line items, and implementation consultancy commonly costs more in year one than the licences. A 50-seat Enterprise deployment is around $105,000 a year before any of that. Checked 2026-08-03.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you are a large sales organisation with genuine complexity — territory management, multi-stage approvals, CPQ, forecasting hierarchies. Nothing open comes close and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Stay if AppExchange integrations are load-bearing, because that ecosystem is unmatched. Stay if you have already sunk years of process into the platform; the migration cost is usually larger than the licence saving for a long time. And stay if enterprise procurement requires the compliance envelope only Salesforce and its peers can supply.
What you are locked into
The deepest in this catalogue, and worth being sober about. Records export readily; that is not where the difficulty is. What binds you is everything built on top — Apex code, Flows, validation rules, page layouts, permission sets, and integrations wired into finance, support and marketing. Years of process live in configuration nobody documented, and a migration is a business-process project with a software component rather than a data move. Budget accordingly, and be suspicious of any plan that treats it as an export.
If you would rather not pay: EspoCRM
EspoCRM
A complete CRM that a small team can run without a specialist.
Free and open source to self-host. Some advanced extensions are paid.
See all 5 Salesforce alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Salesforce before you commit. More crm decisions on Macrostack.