We Pay Salesforce 83% More Than Last Year. But Stopped Using Notion

Is the business model for traditional B2B software in permanent decline because AI agents don’t need seats?

The answer right now, at least from our own data running SaaStr with 3 humans and 20+ AI agents, is more complicated than the simple “seats are dead” narrative making the rounds.

It cuts both ways. And for us … hard.

Let me give you two examples from our own stack. Same vintage, both companies that have shipped real AI features, both companies we genuinely liked. One we now pay 83% more to. The other we still pay, but stopped using months ago.

Exhibit A: Salesforce. Where We Now Pay 83% More, With 80% Fewer Humans.

A year ago we had 10+ human seats on Salesforce.

Today we have 2 human seats and 1 API seat.

You’d might think our Salesforce bill would have collapsed. It didn’t. It went way up.  And it’s OK.

We now pay Salesforce ~$22,000 a year, up from $12,000. That’s an 83% increase year-over-year, with 80% fewer human users.

Why? It’s simple.  It’s because our 20+ AI agents use Salesforce roughly 100x more than our humans ever did. We have an AI VP of Marketing. An AI VP of Customer Success. Four third-party AI GTM agents running on top of Salesforce, including Agentforce running win-back campaigns at 72% open rates.

They never sleep. They never stop querying. They never stop writing. They use Salesforce as the central nervous system of our entire go-to-market motion.

Human seats: down 80%. Usage: up 100x. And Salesforce captured a real share of that value through API calls, Agentforce, Data Cloud, and consumption-based pricing on AI features.

That’s the bull case for traditional B2B software when agents take over the work. Pricing models flex from seats to consumption, and the apps that are actually doing the work, the systems of record, get paid more, not less.

10 Months Ago, We Were Barely Using Salesforce. Now It’s Our AI Agent Hub.