Salesforce Foundations

“Is Agentforce free?” is the question we get asked more than any other, and the honest answer is a frustrating yes, partly, if you’re on the right edition, up to a point. That hedge exists because of Salesforce Foundations — a $0 SKU that quietly hands most Enterprise Edition orgs a working slice of Agentforce, Data 360, Marketing, and Commerce without a new purchase order. It’s the single most under-used thing in the Salesforce estate right now, and also the most misunderstood: half the teams we talk to don’t know they already have it, and the other half think it’s a free lunch with no catch.

It’s neither. Foundations is a genuinely useful zero-cost on-ramp with a specific set of entitlements, a hard credit ceiling, and exactly one setting you can’t take back. This post is what’s actually inside it as of mid-2026, the credit math that decides how far it stretches, and the signals that tell you the free tier has run out of road.

What Foundations actually is

Foundations is not a trial and it’s not a discount. It’s a permanent, no-additional-cost add-on that Salesforce provisions into existing orgs, bringing capabilities from Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Data Cloud (now Data 360) together under one enhanced UI. The pitch is that you get more out of the Salesforce you already pay for without bolting on new products or standing up new infrastructure.

The eligibility line is the first thing to check: Foundations is available to customers on Enterprise Edition or above. If you’re on Professional Edition, this post is aspirational — the free credits and the cross-cloud features don’t come with your edition. On EE and up, it’s a $0 SKU you can provision, and it’s meant to be permanent rather than a 30-day clock.

What it is not is a full license to any of those clouds. Foundations gives you a starter surface of each — enough to run a real pilot and prove value — with clear ceilings that push you to a paid SKU once you’re past pilot scale. That framing matters, because the mistake we see most is treating Foundations entitlements as production capacity. They’re proof-of-concept capacity that happens to be production-grade in quality.

The part everyone actually wants: the credits

Two credit balances come with Foundations, and they are the whole reason it’s interesting for anyone building agents.

200,000 Flex Credits. This is Agentforce currency. Flex Credits are consumed per action — a standard agent action runs 20 credits, so 200,000 credits is roughly 10,000 standard actions to spend however your agents spend them. That’s a real pilot: enough to stand up a service agent, point live traffic at it, and measure your actual cost-per-resolution before you forecast anything.
250,000 Data 360 credits. This is the separate Data 360 currency that meters ingestion, transforms, segmentation, queries, and the rest of the platform’s consumption. It’s what lets you unify a couple of data sources and build the grounding an agent needs, without a paid Data 360 contract.

Worth flagging for anyone comparing this to older write-ups: the Foundations Flex Credit grant was doubled from its original 100,000 to 200,000, and the 250,000 Data 360 credits were added alongside. If you read a 2025-era guide (or, frankly, some of our own earlier posts) quoting 100,000 Flex Credits, that number is stale. The current figures are 200,000 Flex Credits and 250,000 Data 360 credits. Always check the live Agentforce pricing mechanics before you build a business case, because this is exactly the kind of number Salesforce revises.

Alongside the credits you get the tools to spend them: Agent Builder and Prompt Builder are both included, so you can actually design and ground agents rather than just run pre-built ones. That’s the difference between a demo and a build.

What comes from the other clouds

The credits get the attention, but Foundations is deliberately cross-cloud, and the rest is easy to overlook:

Sales. A Sales Console with deal management, quoting, and meeting tools — the pipeline surface, not a full Sales Cloud license.
Service. A Service Console with case management, Knowledge, chat, and a Help Center. This is the base an Agentforce service agent grounds on, which is why Foundations and Agentforce fit together so naturally.
Marketing. A drag-and-drop email builder with 2,000 monthly email sends and built-in analytics. Enough to run real lifecycle email, not enough to be your marketing platform.
Commerce. One D2C digital storefront (US only at time of writing), managed checkout, merchandising, and a Pay Now payment link.
Data 360. The unified data layer itself, which underpins nearly everything above and is the reason the credits matter.

The strategic read: Foundations is Salesforce’s answer to “I want to try the agentic stack but I can’t get budget approved for Agentforce and Data 360 as separate line items.” It removes the procurement blocker so the only thing standing between you and a working pilot is the build.

Why this matters for Agentforce specifically

Here’s the connection people miss. Agentforce cannot run without Data 360 — the Einstein Trust Layer, the audit trail, and the grounding infrastructure all sit on it, so Data 360 has to be provisioned and enabled for any Agentforce use. That sounds like a second product you have to buy. It isn’t, if you’re on Foundations: the Data 360 entitlement Agentforce needs comes bundled, which is exactly the nuance we unpack in does Agentforce need Data Cloud. Provisioning is not the same as purchasing.

So the practical path for an EE org that wants to try an agent is short: provision Foundations, which enables Agentforce and Data 360; use the 200,000 Flex Credits and 250,000 Data 360 credits to build and run a pilot in Agent Builder; measure real consumption under real traffic; then decide what to buy. You never touch a paid SKU until you have your own numbers. That’s a materially better position than forecasting cost from a vendor demo — which, as we’ve argued in Agentforce ROI, is the single most common way teams get the economics wrong.

The one thing you can’t undo

Now the catch, and it’s a real one. Provisioning Foundations is reversible in spirit but not in every detail. When you turn on Foundations in Setup, you choose which features to enable — but once you turn on certain features, particularly the Marketing Cloud-related ones, they cannot be turned off.

Read that twice before you click. If you enable the Marketing surface to “see what it does” and later decide it clutters your org, there’s no clean rollback. Salesforce’s own guidance is blunt about it: plan accordingly, and only turn on what you’ll actually use. In practice that means treating Foundations enablement as a change you scope and stage, not something an admin flips on a Friday afternoon to explore. Enable the pieces you have a plan for — for most teams that’s Agentforce plus Data 360 first — and leave the irreversible Marketing toggles until you genuinely want them.

This is a small thing that becomes a large thing in a production org with real users watching the UI. Governance discipline applies to free features too.

The credits are the ceiling — here’s the math

The free tier ends where the credits run out, so you need to know how fast they burn. The trap is assuming an agent interaction costs one action. It doesn’t.

A single resolved agent conversation is rarely one action. A grounded, reasoning agent that looks something up, calls an action, checks a policy, and answers has fired several actions before it’s done. If a typical resolution burns, say, five actions, then:

200,000 Flex Credits ÷ 20 credits per standard action = 10,000 standard actions
10,000 actions ÷ ~5 actions per resolved interaction   ≈ 2,000 resolved interactions

Two thousand resolved interactions is a genuine pilot — weeks of real traffic for a mid-sized service queue — but it is emphatically not a year of production for a busy contact center. The number that actually matters is your actions-per-resolution, and the only way to know it is to instrument the pilot and watch the Flex Credit balance draw down against resolved cases. Do that math early. The Data 360 side has its own meter: ingestion volume, the engine you pick for insights, and segmentation frequency all pull from the 250,000-credit pool, and a chatty streaming pipeline can drain it faster than a batch one. If you want to make either balance last, the levers are the same ones in our Data 360 credit optimization playbook and the Data 360 pricing guide.

How to tell you’ve outgrown it

Foundations has done its job when you can answer three questions with your own data instead of a vendor’s slide:

Are you consistently within the credit ceilings? If your monthly agent traffic burns through 200,000 Flex Credits well before month-end, you’re past pilot scale and it’s time to price a paid Flex Credit or per-user Agentforce plan against your measured cost-per-resolution.
Do you need more than the starter surface of a cloud? More than 2,000 email sends a month, more than one storefront, a full Sales Cloud feature set — each is a signal that the free slice has become a constraint rather than a convenience.
Is the data foundation carrying production load? If Data 360 has moved from “unifying two sources for a pilot” to “the grounding layer for live customer-facing agents,” you’re running production on pilot entitlements, and the credit meter will tell you before your CFO does.

The healthy pattern is to stay on Foundations until one of those three genuinely bites, and to have the paid-SKU conversation armed with real consumption numbers. Teams that jump straight to a paid Agentforce contract to “do it properly” routinely over-buy, because they sized the contract from a guess instead of a measurement — and the whole point of Foundations is that you no longer have to guess.

What to actually do

If you’re on Enterprise Edition or above, check whether Foundations is already provisioned in your org — a surprising number are, unused. If it isn’t, scope the enablement deliberately: turn on Agentforce and Data 360 first, and leave the irreversible Marketing toggles alone until you have a concrete plan for them. Use Agent Builder and Prompt Builder to build a real pilot agent, ground it on Data 360, and point actual traffic at it. Then watch the two credit balances draw down and record your true actions-per-resolution and Data 360 consumption. When — and only when — a credit ceiling or a feature limit consistently blocks real work, take those numbers into a paid-SKU conversation. Not before.

Foundations doesn’t make Agentforce free forever. It makes the first, most expensive-to-get-wrong decision — how much of the agentic stack to buy — a decision you get to make from evidence. That’s worth more than the credits.

Understanding the basics

Is Agentforce really free with Salesforce Foundations?

Partly, and for pilots rather than production. Foundations is a $0 SKU for Enterprise Edition and above that includes 200,000 Flex Credits (Agentforce’s per-action currency, roughly 10,000 standard actions) and 250,000 Data 360 credits, plus Agent Builder and Prompt Builder. That’s enough to build and run a real agent pilot at no additional cost, but the credits are a ceiling — sustained production traffic will exhaust them and push you to a paid Flex Credit or per-user Agentforce plan.

What editions qualify for Salesforce Foundations?

Foundations is available to customers on Enterprise Edition or above. Professional Edition and below don’t get the free credits or the cross-cloud starter features through Foundations.

What’s the catch with enabling Foundations?

The main one is irreversibility on part of the surface: once you turn on certain features — notably the Marketing Cloud-related ones — they cannot be turned off. Enable Foundations deliberately, turn on only the pieces you have a plan for (Agentforce and Data 360 are the usual first choices), and leave the irreversible Marketing toggles until you genuinely want them.

How long do the free credits last?

There’s no time clock — the tier is permanent — but there is a volume ceiling. How long 200,000 Flex Credits and 250,000 Data 360 credits last depends entirely on your usage: how many actions each agent resolution fires, and how much data you ingest and process. Instrument a pilot, measure your real actions-per-resolution, and you’ll know your own burn rate rather than a generic estimate.

Trying to figure out whether Foundations covers your Agentforce pilot, or whether you’ve outgrown the free tier and need to size a paid plan? Run the numbers with our Agentforce ROI calculator or talk to us — sizing the agentic stack from real consumption instead of a demo is exactly the work we do.

Salesforce Foundations: what's actually free, and the point where you outgrow it