Salesforce + custom AI. Without paying Salesforce's AI premium.
You already pay for Salesforce. You shouldn't have to pay another $300–550 per user per month for Agentforce.
We add custom AI agents on top of your existing Salesforce: RAG retrieval, document AI, agentic workflows, for a one-time build cost. You skip the per-seat AI tax. You own the AI.
Why custom AI on Salesforce, not Einstein or Agentforce.
Salesforce's pitch is reasonable: their AI lives inside their platform, so it's easy to add. The problem is the pricing.
Agentforce (launched late 2024, re-priced three times since): around $300–550 per user per month, plus opaque “credit pool” overages when usage spikes. As of Q1 2026, fewer than 8,000 of Salesforce's ~150,000 customers had adopted it. The most common complaint is that pricing is unpredictable for finance teams trying to budget annually.{{Bhavin to confirm Agentforce $300–550 pricing hasn't moved}}
Einstein add-ons (the older product): cheaper per user but tied to specific features (Einstein for Service, Einstein for Sales). Each add-on is an extra SKU. Stacks up fast.
Breeze (HubSpot equivalent): $0.50 per resolved conversation. Works at low volume, painful at scale.
Custom AI agents (what we build): one-time build cost ($80k–$200k for a focused system). Then minimal ongoing: your hosting + API costs to whichever LLM provider you pick. For most teams running 1,000+ AI interactions per day, the math breaks even by Month 8 and goes positive after that.
Four AI capability shapes.
RAG-powered Knowledge Base
Your Salesforce holds tons of structured data (accounts, opportunities, cases, notes). We layer custom RAG so your team can ask natural-language questions across it: "show me all churned accounts in the last 90 days where the support ticket mentioned billing." Runs on your data, stored in your infra.
Example: 50k-document RAG over support tickets + knowledge articles for a US insurance carrier, sub-200ms p95 retrieval.
Document AI for Intake
Most Salesforce orgs deal with unstructured documents: emails, PDFs, scanned forms. We build agents that read incoming documents, extract structured fields, and create the right Salesforce records (Opportunities, Cases, Custom Objects) with confidence scores attached.
Example: ACORD 25 / 101 PDF intake → Salesforce custom object population, 94% acceptance rate for one trucking insurance MGA.
Agentic Sales / Service Workflows
Multi-step automation alongside Salesforce. Agent picks up a lead, qualifies it (calls APIs, checks data quality, runs basic outreach), and only escalates to a human when confidence drops below threshold. Replaces what would otherwise need 3–5 BDRs.
Example: outbound qualification agent for a B2B SaaS pulling 10k+ leads/month, escalating only ~12% to sales reps.
Custom Apex + AI Hybrid Logic
When the AI decision needs to trigger heavy Salesforce platform logic (Flows, Validation Rules, Apex Triggers), we bridge the two. Agent makes a call, Apex handles the Salesforce-side mechanics, both stay observable.
Example: Pro Trade Solutions custom Apex flows with AI-assisted talent matching across 162 classes.
We've shipped Einstein and Agentforce. We'll do it again when it's the right call.
- You're under 50 users + low AI volume. Per-seat or per-conversation pricing genuinely doesn't hurt at this scale.
- You only need AI in core sales/service paths Salesforce already models. Agentforce ships built-in patterns for Opportunity Insights, Case classification, etc.
- Your team has zero engineering capacity. Custom AI requires someone to own it post-build. Salesforce's native AI is admin-configurable.
- You need to stay in Salesforce's compliance posture (Healthcare / FedRAMP / specific regulated industries).
300+ Salesforce projects across 15 years.
Same 4-step process.
Common questions.
Want a Salesforce + AI cost comparison?
Free 30-min call. Tell us your user count, your current Salesforce spend, and what AI capabilities you're considering. We'll show you the year-by-year math for Einstein / Agentforce vs. custom.