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Is Salesforce free? What it actually costs in 2026

The short answer

Salesforce now lists a $0 Free Suite. The paid Sales Cloud editions run from Starter Suite at $25 per user a month to Max at $550, billed annually.

The Sales Cloud pricing page lists a Free Suite at $0 per user a month beside the paid suites. Its limits are not itemised on the pricing page itself.

What the free tier actually includes

  • Free Suite: $0 per user a month — feature limits are on the plan's own page, not the pricing grid
  • Everything beyond it is priced per user with an annual contract

Where the wall is

Seats and contracts. Salesforce is priced per user per month on annual billing, so the wall is the second seat and the twelve-month commitment rather than a feature toggle.

After that: Starter Suite $25 per user a month; Pro Suite $100; Core $195; Advanced $395; Max $550 — all billed annually.

Can you self-host Salesforce? No — cloud only

Salesforce is cloud only. EspoCRM, Twenty and Odoo are the self-hosted CRMs compared here.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

Self-hosting EspoCRM

needs 2–4 GB. The official Docker stack runs four containers (app, daemon, websocket, MariaDB). A 4–5 user Docker install reported 40% of 4 GB in use, and forum users put 2 GB as fine for light use. (docs say not stated by the vendor. A forum super-moderator says 1 GB is enough for a plain Nginx + PHP-FPM + MariaDB install, and Cloudron packages it with a 512 MB app limit, with MySQL as a separate service.)$6–24/mo for a 10-user instance on a 2–4 GB VPS

Self-hosting SuiteCRM

needs 4 GB. Even a test box is quoted at 3 GB, and production adds MySQL, the cron and, from 8.10, a Messenger worker. (docs say not stated by the vendor. Community guidance puts a test or development machine at 3 GB of RAM and about 10 GB of disk, with PHP's memory_limit at 256 MB or more.)$12–24/mo for a 10-user instance on a 4 GB VPS

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

90

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 compared

Compare the free options head-to-head

EspoCRM vs SuiteCRM→EspoCRM vs Odoo→EspoCRM vs Twenty→

Read from Salesforce's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-23 — 40 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.

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