# Salesforce buyer's checklist: 14 questions, 11 of them answerable before the demo > A Salesforce purchase checklist built from the vendor's published pages: edition, billing term, transaction fees, the API surcharge, Flex Credits, sandboxes, storage, support tier and the exit. _Source: https://professionalstoolkit.com/articles/salesforce-buyers-checklist — The Professional's Toolkit · updated 2026-10-06_ --- A Salesforce quote is not a price, it is a configuration. Five editions, a catalogue of add-ons with published floors, two charges that live in a comparison table rather than on a card, and billing terms that differ by edition. This checklist exists so that none of that reaches you as a surprise in month four. Every item below comes from a page the vendor published, read from the United States on 5 and 6 October 2026. Nothing here requires inside knowledge. It requires reading the second page. **OUR TAKE:** Work through this before the demo, not after. Eleven of the fourteen items are answerable from published pages, which means you can walk into the conversation knowing more than the deck will tell you, and the three that are not answerable in public are exactly the three to get in writing. **11 of 14** — Checklist items answerable from published pages before you speak to anyone. The other three are the ones to get in writing. - **$25/user/mo** — The API surcharge in the editions comparison table, on the interface every integration runs through. - **1 of 5** — Editions sold month to month. Any other edition makes your decision a twelve-month one. - **26%** — Share of the English reviews we read that raise support, at an average of one star. Premier Support is an add-on at Pro Suite. ## 1. Establish which product the quote covers Starter Suite at $25 per user per month and Pro Suite at $100 are suites, bundling sales, service, marketing and commerce. Core at $195, Advanced at $395 and Max at $550 are Sales Cloud. They sit in two separate blocks of the same pricing page. Ask: is this quote for a suite or for Sales Cloud. A demo that showed you Sales Cloud features against a suite price is the single most common way this purchase goes wrong. > 💡 **undefined:** Send the published items as written questions before the demo rather than asking them live. A rep who answers in writing gives you a document you can compare with another vendor's; a rep who answers verbally gives you a memory. Eleven of these fourteen items have a published answer, so the written reply either matches the page or starts a useful conversation. ## 2. Confirm the billing term you are being committed to Starter Suite is the only edition sold month to month. Every edition above it carries an annual billing note, and the pricing page has no monthly toggle for them. Ask: is there any monthly option for this edition, and what is the minimum term. If the answer is twelve months, your evaluation window is the 30-day trial and nothing else. ## 3. Check whether the annual commitment earns anything At Starter Suite the monthly rate and the annual rate are both $25 per user per month. The annual commitment carries no discount at all, which is unusual in this category. Ask: what discount applies to a twelve-month commitment at our edition and seat count. The answer is not on the page for the higher editions, so it belongs in the quote. > 💡 **undefined:** Ask what your Slack spend duplicates. The comparison table bundles Slack Free through Pro Suite, Business+ at Core and Advanced and Enterprise+ at Max, so a company already paying for Slack at that tier may be buying it twice. Procurement rarely raises this and the money is real. ## 4. Ask about transaction fees if you take payments The sales pricing page shows Starter Suite at $25 with no mention of fees. The vendor's own small-business pricing page shows the same $25 and states that it is a starting price and that transaction fees apply[2]. Ask: do transaction fees apply to our use of the commerce features, and at what rate. Two of the vendor's pages disagree in emphasis, so the question is fair and the answer should be in writing. ## 5. Settle the API surcharge The editions comparison table marks Web Services API as an additional $25 per user per month. That is the interface every integration, data sync and custom tool runs through. We could not read which editions carry the charge, because the table's checkmark cells contain no text. Ask: does this quote include API access for all our users, and at what cost per user. > ⚠ **undefined:** Two of the vendor's own pages describe the same $25 Starter Suite rate differently: the sales pricing page mentions no fees, while the small-business pricing page calls it a starting price to which transaction fees apply. If you take payments through the commerce features, the second page describes your bill. ## 6. Price the AI separately from the seats Agentforce for Sales and Agentforce Coworker are included at Max. Below Max, Agentforce for Sales is an add-on from $125 per user per month, and the page's footnote directs you to a sales representative for detailed AI pricing. Ask: is the AI in this quote or outside it, and at what price per user. ## 7. Get the Flex Credit allowance in the quote Published allowances: none in the suites, 500 thousand per org per year at Core, 1 million at Advanced, 2.75 million at Max. The pool is per org rather than per seat and resets annually. Ask: how many credits are included, how much a typical action in our workflow consumes, and what happens when the pool empties. Only the first of those three is published. > ⚠ **undefined:** The Core card's feature line refers to a Professional Edition the page does not sell, and Momentum appears as included on the card but available for purchase and Coming Soon in the table. Get both inclusions written into the quote rather than inferred from the card. ## 8. Decide the sandbox question before the edition question A Partial Sandbox is included once per org from Core upward. A Full Sandbox is a purchase at Core and included once per org at Advanced and Max. Ask: does our implementation need a full copy of production to test against. If yes, the edition is already decided and it is not Core. ## 9. Check your storage position against the basis change The suites and Core are allocated 10GB per org, with Core adding 20MB per user. Advanced and Max move to 1GB per user. Ask: what is our current data and attachment volume, and which side of that basis change does it put us on. Storage limits are the most common silent trigger for an unplanned upgrade. ## 10. Look for the Slack overlap The comparison table maps Slack editions to CRM editions one for one: Slack Free through Pro Suite, Slack Business+ at Core and Advanced, Slack Enterprise+ at Max. Ask: we already pay for Slack at this tier, so what does this quote duplicate. This is a procurement question that sales teams rarely raise, and the money is real. ## 11. Establish what support you are buying Premier Support is listed as an add-on on the Pro Suite card. Premier Success arrives with Core. Ask: which support tier is included here, what the response commitment is, and what the upgrade costs. Support is the second-largest theme in the English reviews we read, at 26% and an average of one star, and the editions where it was never included are overrepresented in those complaints. ## 12. Resolve the two contradictions on the page The Core card's feature line refers to everything in Professional Edition, which is not one of the five tiers the page sells. Momentum is listed on the Core card as included, while the comparison table marks it available for purchase lower down and Coming Soon higher up. Ask: confirm in writing that Momentum and Premier Success are included at our edition. A card that contradicts its own table is not a document to rely on. ## 13. Test the exit before you sign the entrance Export your data during the trial and look at what comes out. Read the renewal clause and the notice period. Contracts, renewals and cancellation appear in 19% of the English reviews we read, at an average of one star. One reviewer wrote: "Impossible to cancel. Customer Service is unresponsive. They still charged our card after several emails and phone calls to cancel within the contractual period, and continue to ignore us.[5]" We cannot verify an individual account, and we are not presenting it as typical. We are presenting it as the reason to read the clause while you still have leverage. ## 14. Check the figures in your own currency The pricing page re-prices rather than converts. The $25 rate is displayed as 25 EUR and as 20 GBP, and the $100 rate as 100 EUR and 80 GBP. Ask: what are these rates in the currency we will be billed in. Do not convert the dollar figures yourself, because the vendor's displayed number is the fact and your exchange rate is an assumption. ## 15. Count the seats you actually need, and the ones you do not Per-seat pricing rewards precision. Two rows on this page let you avoid buying full seats for people who are not selling. Partner Relationship Management is priced from $10 per login per month, the only per-login item on the page, and it exists for people outside your company. If you have resellers or partners who need visibility rather than a CRM, that is a different line than a $195 seat. Ask: who in this quote needs a full seat, and who needs a login. A quote built by headcount rather than by role is almost always larger than it needs to be. ## 16. Know what the trial cannot tell you The trial is 30 days, up to 10 users, on Starter Suite, with guided onboarding. It will tell you whether your data imports cleanly, whether your team can work in the interface, and what your duplicate rate is. It cannot tell you anything about sandboxes, per-user storage, Flex Credits or the agent layer, because none of those exist at that tier. Nor can it tell you about quoting and forecasting, which begin at Pro Suite. Ask: can we have a pilot or a sandbox on the edition we are actually buying. If the answer is no, your evidence for the purchase is documents plus a demo, and this checklist is the documents part. ## 17. Decide who owns the system, in writing, internally This one is not a question for the vendor. Implementations stall for organisational reasons more often than technical ones, and setup, admin work and consultants appear in 11% of the English reviews we read, at an average of 1.1 stars. Three names before you sign: who owns the data and can say what a duplicate is, who owns the process and can define a qualified lead without a committee, and who owns the system and is working through Trailhead. The vendor's own support structure assumes the third person exists, since Premier Support is an add-on at Pro Suite and Premier Success only arrives at Core. ## 18. Put the AI governance questions in your questionnaire None of these were answerable from any page we read in October 2026: which models run the agents, whether your CRM data is used in training, how long prompts and outputs are retained and where, whether specific objects or fields can be excluded, where inference happens, and what audit log exists of actions an agent takes on records. Ask all six in writing if your company has an AI review process. The vendor publishes a security and trust hub with MFA, advisories and compliance sections, which is the right starting point, but the compliance subdomain returned an empty page to our render and we read no certification list. ## A worked example of how to use this list Take a twelve-person sales team considering Core. Work down the list and three items change the shape of the quote before any negotiation happens. Item 8, sandboxes: if the implementation needs a full copy of production, Core is the wrong edition and the conversation is about Advanced. Item 9, storage: twelve people on a 10GB org pool with years of email sync and attachments is a question, not an assumption, and the answer decides whether the basis change at Advanced is worth paying for. Item 15, seats: if three of the twelve only need visibility, they may not need seats at all. None of those three are feature questions. All three are published. That is the point of the exercise: the quote you receive is a configuration somebody else chose, and most of the levers are on pages you can read before the call. ## The three answers that will not be public Per-action credit consumption. The model provenance, training position, retention and opt-out terms for the AI, none of which appeared on any page we read. And which editions carry the API surcharge. Everything else on this list is published. If a rep cannot answer the published items, that is information about the rep. If they cannot answer the three unpublished ones in writing, that is information about the purchase. ## FAQ **What should I ask before buying Salesforce?** Start with which edition the quote covers and whether it is a suite or Sales Cloud, since those are two different products in two blocks of the same page. Then the billing term, the discount for committing, whether transaction fees apply, whether the $25 per user per month API surcharge applies to your users, what Agentforce costs on top, how many Flex Credits are included, which support tier you get, and what the renewal and notice terms are. **What hidden costs does Salesforce have?** Nothing is strictly hidden, but four charges are not on the per-seat cards: the additional $25 per user per month for Web Services API in the comparison table, Agentforce for Sales from $125 per user per month below the Max edition, the transaction fees the small-business page attaches to the Starter Suite rate, and add-ons such as Revenue Intelligence from $220 and Revenue Cloud from $200 per user per month. **Does Salesforce charge an implementation fee?** No mandatory onboarding fee appears on the pricing page we read, which is a point in its favour against competitors that do charge one. Implementation cost usually arrives as consultant time instead, and the sandbox rows in the comparison table are a good proxy for how much of it you will need. **How do I avoid buying the wrong Salesforce edition?** Decide by quota rather than by feature. The rows that force an edition are sandboxes, a Partial Sandbox from Core and a Full Sandbox at Advanced and Max, storage, which moves from 10GB per org to 1GB per user at Advanced, and Flex Credits, which start at 500 thousand per org per year at Core. Features justify the choice afterwards; those three rows make it. **Can I negotiate Salesforce pricing?** The published rates are the starting point, and every add-on price on the page begins with the word from, which makes it a floor rather than a rate. The items with the most room are usually the add-ons and the support tier, and the lever you have is a written quote that lists each one separately. **What happens if I want to cancel Salesforce?** Read the renewal clause and notice period before you sign, and test your data export during the 30-day trial. Contracts, renewals and cancellation appear in 19% of the English reviews we read, at an average of one star, and above Starter Suite the billing is annual with no monthly option. ## What good looks like A quote that names the edition, states the term and the discount, lists every add-on with its price, states the Flex Credit allowance, confirms the support tier, confirms API access, and confirms Momentum's status. Seven lines. If what you have instead is a per-seat figure and an invitation to sign, you are holding the beginning of a negotiation rather than the end of one. ## Sources [1] vendor pricing page, read from the United States — https://www.salesforce.com/sales/pricing (2026-10) [2] vendor small-business pricing page, read from the United States — https://www.salesforce.com/small-business/pricing/ (2026-10) [3] vendor product page, read from the United States — https://www.salesforce.com/sales/cloud/ (2026-10) [4] vendor trial page — https://www.salesforce.com/uk/small-business/free-trial/starter-suite-2step/ (2026-10) [5] Trustpilot, user sentiment only — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/salesforce.com?languages=all (2026-10) [6] G2, user sentiment only — https://ai.g2.com/product/agentforce-sales-formerly-salesforce-sales-cloud (2026-10) [7] Capterra, user sentiment only — https://www.capterra.com/compare/61368-152373/Salesforce-vs-HubSpot-CRM (2026-10) [8] Salesforce security and trust hub — https://security.salesforce.com/ [9] Trailhead, the vendor's first-party learning platform — https://trailhead.salesforce.com/