Salesforce Data Cloud (Data 360) Pricing Explained: Credits, Profiles and Hidden Costs

Salesforce Data 360, the customer data platform (CDP) that Salesforce called Data Cloud until Dreamforce 2025, is priced two ways. Flex Credits cost $500 per 100,000 ($0.005 each) and are spent on actions such as unification, segmentation and queries. Profile pricing is a flat $240 per 1,000 profiles a year ($420 for Enterprise Profiles). Ingestion is free; storage and AI-agent actions bill on top. Prices below were checked on 17 October 2026 12.

Who this is for: finance, procurement and architecture teams who need to turn a Salesforce quote into a defensible annual number. You will get the current rate card, three worked scenarios with explicit assumptions, five cost levers and a procurement question list. For the wider landscape, see our CDP pricing explainer and the guides hub.

The two pricing models: Flex Credits and Profiles

Salesforce's public pricing page (checked 17 October 2026) offers three options, and says the page is "for information purposes only and subject to change" 1.

Two details matter. First, "free" means batch ingestion and zero-copy integrations; everything after ingestion is usage-based under all three options. Second, Profile pricing "un-meters" only the usage that forms unified profiles. Querying data, unstructured processing for AI agents and similar work still consume Flex Credits 1. So Profile pricing and Flex Credits are layered, not alternatives you can ignore.

Salesforce also sells entry SKUs. Its pricing calculator lists Data 360 Starter at $60,000 a year (10 million Flex Credits, 5 TB storage) and a $0 Provisioning SKU (250,000 credits, 1 TB) for customers whose other Salesforce products depend on Data 360 4. Billing depends on how your org is contracted, and a Monthly Usage Summary goes to the billing contact 1.

Data Cloud vs Data 360: what the rename changed

SalesforceBen counts Data 360 as the platform's sixth name, after Customer 360 Audiences, Salesforce CDP, Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, Salesforce Genie and Salesforce Data Cloud; it arrived with the Agentforce 360 announcements at Dreamforce in October 2025 8. Its coverage does not mention a pricing change.

The practical effect is on paper. Salesforce's current pages say only "Data 360", while older order forms and the August 2025 rate card still say "Data Cloud Credits" and "Data Services Credits" 3. Salesforce says existing Data Services Credits customers are not forced to migrate, but moving to Flex Credits or Profile pricing means swapping all existing Data Services Credits 1. Check which document governs your contract before you compare anything.

For context on why Salesforce is pushing this, Q2 FY27 (quarter ended 31 July 2026) Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue reached nearly $3.9 billion, up over 210% year on year; Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion, and from Q2 FY27 that figure includes Salesforce's wider AI offerings, Slackbot and Headless 360 7. That is a growth signal, not a statement about your price.

What consumes Flex Credits: the current rate card

The Flex Credits rate card updated 31 August 2026, linked from Salesforce's rate-card index 6, sets credits per unit for each Data 360 usage type 2. Multipliers fall in four volume tiers measured in credits per usage type per calendar month: base up to 300,000 credits, tier 2 to 1.5 million, tier 3 to 12.5 million, tier 4 above. Tiers reset on the first of each month, and sandboxes use a flat multiplier. We compared the 23 February and 18 August 2026 versions: the Data 360 multipliers are identical in all three.

Sources: 2 for the first five columns, 3 for the last.

Reading the table:

• Unification and the real-time pipeline dominate. One million rows of unification costs 25,000 times one million rows of queries. Real-time is 71 times streaming at base tier.
• Tiers are applied by band. Ten million rows of unification costs 660,000 credits ($3,300), not 750,000, because the first 300,000 credits bill at 75,000 per million rows and the next 1.2 million at 60,000. An independent analysis reaches the same figures 10.
• The legacy card is not the Flex card. Segmentation, activation, queries, real-time and unstructured processing are cheaper on the older card; unification, prep, streaming and ingestion are cheaper on Flex. Salesforce's rate cards say usage types, tiers and multipliers "may be updated from time to time", and that tier changes count as multiplier changes 2. Salesforce has posted Flex card versions dated 23 February, 21 April, 17 June, 18 August and 31 August 2026; we opened three of them.
• Credits expire. Flex Credits must be used before the order end date and "no rollover will be permitted" 2. Pilot features can consume credits if the pilot terms say so.

Storage: small per terabyte, easy to forget

The pricing calculator and what it leaves out

Salesforce's Data 360 pricing calculator asks for industry, employee count and currency, then for the number of customers (unified profiles) and number of sources; its profile input is customers multiplied by sources. It outputs Flex Credits needed (rounded up to the nearest 100,000), list price, cost per credit and a PDF 4. The assumptions are explicit: first year only, illustrative, "not a price lock or commitment", and actual consumption depends on architecture, data and configuration. Salesforce's separate pricing guide is a gated download, which we did not request 11.

Treat the calculator as a first draft. It does not show per-operation credits, and it cannot know whether your identity resolution rebuilds everything nightly.

Agentforce coupling: one credit pool, two meters

Flex Credits move between Data 360 and Agentforce 1, so an agent project and a data project compete for the same pool. On the 31 August 2026 card a standard Agentforce action costs 20 credits, or $0.10 at list; voice actions cost 30 2. Salesforce's own Agentforce use-case estimate also bills each agent data lookup as Data 360 query rows 5. In practice:

• Data 360 costs scale with your profile base and refresh cadence.
• Agentforce costs scale with conversations and actions, which depend on customer behaviour, not your architecture.
• A budget that models only one will miss the other. See Agentforce pricing and owned inference.

Three worked scenarios

Scenario A: mid-size retailer

In the expected case unification is about $82,000, real-time about $64,000, segmentation about $21,000 and streaming about $20,000; storage is about $1,100. Moving from nightly full rebuilds to weekly saves roughly $235,000 a year ($317,000 versus $82,000).

Scenario B: regional bank with 10 million profiles

The low case uses the same 5% daily-change logic as Salesforce's own example 5. The expected case is roughly $156,000 unification, $40,000 real-time and $29,000 streaming, with storage about $2,800.

Profiles for the same bank: 10 million profiles at $240 per 1,000 is $2.4 million a year; Enterprise Profiles is $4.2 million 1. Those include 10 million or 20 million Flex Credits, worth $50,000 or $100,000 at list. At list prices the Profile SKU exceeds even the high case here.

Scenario C: hospital system with an Agentforce patient-service agent

In the expected case Agentforce actions are about $162,000 (52% of the total), unification about $109,000 and unstructured processing about $18,000. For comparison, Salesforce's own regional-health example for 10 million profiles totals $106,109 in year one, of which $96,250 is unification; it uses the older Data Services multipliers 5.

Hospital buyers also need paper. Salesforce's business associate addendum page (last updated 30 September 2026) lists Data 360 as a covered service, but coverage applies only if the signed BAA names the service, and Agentforce services carry restrictions such as no medical advice, diagnosis or treatment 9. See our BAA checklist.

Profiles vs Flex Credits: where the break-even sits

A profile costs $0.24 a year on the Profiles SKU ($0.42 on Enterprise), which equals 48 Flex Credits per profile per year. At the base unification multiplier of 75,000 credits per million rows, that buys about 640 full unification passes of every profile. Even a nightly rebuild is 365 passes, and volume tiers lower the cost further. On these list prices and our assumptions, Profile pricing is a predictability premium, not a discount, at 10 million profiles. At 100,000 profiles it is $24,000 a year, closer to where Salesforce positions it: getting started with CDP use cases 1.

Five levers that cut the bill

1. Unify incrementally, not nightly. In scenario A, weekly instead of nightly unification saves about $235,000 a year. Reserve full rebuilds for schema changes and run targeted rules for urgent cases such as consent withdrawals.
2. Treat real-time as a scarce resource. Five million events a month on the real-time pipeline costs about $63,600 a year; the same events on the streaming pipeline cost about $1,050. Use real-time only for sub-second decisions.
3. Refresh segments and activations at the cadence people use them. In scenario A, 80 segments refreshed weekly instead of daily falls from about $20,900 to about $3,100.
4. Filter before you pay for rows. Prep, streaming and unification are all billed per row processed. Send only the events, fields and history windows you model or activate on.
5. Contract for it. Model per month, because tiers reset monthly; ask to pin the rate card version; size commitments against expected use because credits do not roll over; and use Salesforce's Digital Wallet to watch consumption 1.

Questions to ask Salesforce before you sign

• Which rate card version applies, and can it be fixed for the term? Does your order form say Flex Credits or Data Services Credits?
• Are tiers marginal bands per usage type per month, and what happens to unused credits at term end?
• What is the exact definition of a billable profile (unified or source)?
• What is the storage price, and what is included in each SKU?
• How do Data 360 and Agentforce credits convert, and who can draw on the shared pool?
• What is the pay-as-you-go price if you exceed a pre-commit, and what are renewal price protections?
• Which pilot features can consume credits, and what do sandboxes consume?
• Is the BAA signed and does it name Data 360 and each feature you plan to use?
• Can Salesforce put a written estimate on your row counts, with assumptions, in both Flex and Profile form?
• What are the export and exit terms if you leave? See our RFP template.

How credit pricing compares with MTU pricing and flat licences

A flat licence trades metering for operating burden: you or a partner run the infrastructure, which is a bad trade for small teams without platform engineers. For the model across 1 to 50 million profiles, see why per-profile pricing breaks at scale and the 3-year TCO model.