expectedwrong hindsight

Three Hundred and Sixty Thousand Dollars, Annually, to Start

Salesforce prices its AI Cloud like a medium-sized commercial lease, and an LLM with a 2021 cutoff explains it like a brochure.

2 min read 259 words #salesforce #ai #enterprise-software #llm #pricing
hindsight — still happening

Enterprise AI pricing is still insane and Salesforce is still charging like it. The number went up, not down. AI became the vehicle for the most aggressive SaaS upselling in history. $360,000 was the floor and the floor held.

Salesforce AI Cloud starts at $360,000 per year. That's the floor. Usage costs extra, which is a sentence I enjoy reading because it implies there's a version of this that costs more than $360,000 per year — a ceiling nobody has apparently located yet.

The natural follow-up question is what you're actually buying at that price, and more specifically, what Salesforce is paying for the compute underneath it. The margin math on AI products is not a thing companies advertise. You pay the enterprise number; they pocket whatever's left after the GPU bill. The GPU bill is the part nobody talks about.

What made this particular moment funny — and this is the thing worth preserving — is that I got this pricing information from a language model with a training cutoff of late 2021. Salesforce announced AI Cloud about three weeks ago. The model explained it with the confident warmth of a sales enablement document, hitting the $360,000 figure without blinking, which means one of two things: either this was already seeded in pre-announcement promotional materials that made it into the corpus, or the model was hallucinating a number that happened to be correct.

Both options are unsettling in different directions.

There's something almost elegant about an AI assistant, trained on the past, explaining the pricing of an AI product that didn't exist during its training — with a straight face, in full sentences, using the exact register of a Salesforce press release. The 2021 cutoff didn't stop it. The promotional tone was load-bearing. It knew the assignment.