If you use Salesforce Enterprise Edition or Salesforce Unlimited Edition, you may have the ability to leverage Salesforce Platform Licenses for some of your users to substantially reduce Salesforce licensing costs.
While the Salesforce Enterprise and Unlimited licenses are for your users requiring access to the CRM objects (see below), Salesforce Platform Licenses (formerly known as Force.com licenses) are created for users who need access to accounts, contacts, and custom objects developed within your Salesforce instance, but do not need to access the CRM objects.
What are the CRM objects? They are:
- Campaigns
- Contracts
- Forecasts
- Leads
- Opportunities
- Quotes
- Products/Price Books
- Solutions
- Orders
In addition to accessing accounts and contacts, the Salesforce Platform License user can access up to 10 custom objects with the same functionality that is available in Salesforce Enterprise Edition. This functionality includes:
- Alerts
- Apex
- AppExchange Products
- Assets and Work Orders
- Collaboration Tools (Chatter, Files, Lightning Community Builder)
- Email Templates
- Integration via real-time API
- Lightning Flow Automation (Flow + Process Builder)
- Salesforce Mobile App
- Visualforce
- Workflow and Approvals
How to reduce Salesforce licensing costs
The Platform licenses get their name based on the fact that they give the user access to the Salesforce Platform. This is the same platform that Enterprise and Unlimited users access. But Platform licenses are a lot less expensive.
For example, the cost of a Salesforce Sales Cloud Enterprise user license is $1,800/year per license, while the license cost of a Lightning Platform Starter is $300/year per license. Identifying which of your users can leverage a Lightning Platform Starter license instead of a full Salesforce license can reduce salesforce licensing costs and save you $1,500/year per license!
The challenge then is which users do you move to Platform licenses and is your Salesforce instance setup to support Platform licenses?
StarrData can create or modify a Salesforce instance to leverage Platform licenses. In many cases, the cost savings from utilizing Platform licenses can more than offset the cost of hiring us!
Contact us if you would like to discuss how you can leverage Salesforce Platform licenses in your organization.
