I remember the first Salesforce conference I went to. It must have been about 2008 in London. I was especially struck by the “no software” motto that was shown at the time and how, when they talked on stage, everything was about no need to get your hands dirty. That Salesforce just provided an out-of-the-box, over-the-web usable platform and that they took care of all the messy bits.
My, how times have changed. Fast forward to 2026 and the latest and greatest marketing campaign from Salesforce is Headless 360. The idea that in the world of AI coding, we can now focus on Salesforce as a system of record for our customer data and operate it headless with the applications that we so choose.
Headless 360 is being positioned as the modern composable future, which I don’t disagree with. But once you strip away the User Experience (UX) layer, what you’re left with is effectively a create-read-update-delete (CRUD) database behind an application programming interface (API). Why is it still priced as if you’re consuming the whole platform?
Look I’m not anti-Salesforce. We’ve been a partner of Salesforce for many years and I do believe their software is fantastic and that in the right hands it’s really powerful. The question here is whether the pricing model has kept pace with how it’s being sold.
When you go headless, you strip away Lightning UX, declarative page layouts, the admin-configurable frontend, and that whole no-code experience that business users touch and that Salesforce has been touting for years. It’s ironic. The more headless you go, the less of what you are paying for you actually use.
Per-user-per-month pricing was designed for a model where every seat consumes the full Software as a Service (SaaS) experience. Headless inverts that. There are fewer humans in the User Interface (UI), there’s more system-to-system API traffic, and the value is delivered to a custom front-end that you build and maintain yourself.
To their credit Salesforce has seen this coming. Headless 360 isn’t being sold per seat but has been shifted to a consumption-based pricing model. I guess this is an admission that when agents rather than humans are doing the work, charging per user stops making sense. Fair enough, that’s the right direction.
The problem is, though, as I write this, they haven’t told anyone what consumption actually costs. The architecture shipped at Salesforce TrailblazerDX in April but the price tag didn’t. Enterprise production pricing is still undisclosed. We swapped a pricing model that was at least predictable, where you knew your seat count for one that is elastic, usage-driven, and currently unpriced.
So I’m sure some people will say the platform isn’t just CRUD. It includes the security and sharing model, the compliance posture, the system of record that other tools already speak to. That’s fair. That value is real, but it’s infrastructure value. And infrastructure you depend on in production is something you buy against a known price and a known service level. Right now, with Headless 360, you have neither.
And it’s not just the price that’s missing: analysts have pointed out the announcement is also silent on service-level agreements (SLAs) for things like Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool calls, which matter enormously when agents are doing real-time work. So you’re being asked to architect a production dependency on something with neither a published price nor a published performance guarantee.
And there’s a sting in the tail of “consumption-based.” It sounds buyer-friendly (pay for what you use) but agents don’t behave like people. A human consumes a handful of screens a day. An agent can generate tens of thousands of interactions continuously, across sales, service, analytics, and orchestration, without ever getting tired. Meter that against your CRUD layer you’ve bought an uncapped tab.
I’m not telling anyone not to use Headless 360. The capability is real, and some of it is genuinely good. But “no software” was a promise about simplicity. Salesforce takes care of the messy bits, you just use it. “Headless” is close to the opposite trade. You take back the front-end, you take back the maintenance, and you take on a bill that scales with how hard your agents work.
Before you build that dependency into your architecture, it’s worth asking the question Salesforce hasn’t answered: what does it actually cost, and what happens to that cost when the agents really get going?
‘What’s left when you take the head off Salesforce?‘ was written by Walpole Partnership’s Managing Director, Andy Pieroux
