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Small businesses find Salesforce upgrades too expensive and inflexible
.91
Demand — how loud & how many (score)
Willing to payExplicit
Momentum (7d)▲ 10.8%
Cluster4 posts · 4 people
MarketplaceHubSpot App Marketplace
Updated19d ago
The story
The pain
We're a small business that has outgrown Salesforce's Professional Edition, but upgrading to Enterprise or Unlimited is prohibitively expensive. The cost jumps 2.5x or more just to get basic features like API access and unlimited flows, and every additional capability requires another third-party subscription. Competitors like HubSpot offer comparable or cheaper pricing with more built-in features, making it hard to justify staying with Salesforce.
Evidence
What people said · 4 complaints, 4 people
We’re capped at 5 active flows. No native API access — that’s a $25/user/month add-on. Our current per-license cost is roughly $50–75, so we’re paying somewhere in the $8–10k/year range. To get API access and unlimited flows — features that cost Salesforce essentially nothing to enable — the real answer is upgrading to Enterprise at $165–175/license. That’s 2.5x our current spend before we’ve added a single new capability.
HubSpot is comparably priced or cheaper and includes a native dialer, automatic call recording and transcription, real workflow automation, SMS, and dramatically better marketing tooling — out of the box.
I got on a call with four people — two from Salesforce, two from a separate implementation firm. The presentation ended at $85,000 for year one and roughly $30,000 ongoing. Nobody had spent enough time on my business to show me a single application relevant to what we actually do.
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