Two of the largest CRM vendors changed the way they charge within about eighteen months of each other. Salesforce raised list prices across its core editions in August 2025. HubSpot went further and replaced its pricing unit entirely, moving to a seats model in March 2024. Both changes are now far enough in the past that the effects show up in audited financial results rather than in speculation, which makes this a rare chance to check what repricing actually does to vendor revenue and to product usage.
Salesforce: a 6% list increase paired with an AI upsell
Effective August 1, 2025, Salesforce raised list prices by an average of 6% on Enterprise and Unlimited Editions across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service, and select Industry Clouds, as covered by Salesforce Ben and confirmed in the company's own pricing update announcement. Sales Cloud Enterprise moved from $165 to $175 per user per month, and Unlimited from $330 to $350. Starter, Pro Suite, and Salesforce Foundations editions were left untouched, which deliberately insulated the smallest accounts from the change.
The increase did not arrive on its own. Salesforce introduced Agentforce as an add-on at $125 per user per month, and Agentforce 1 Editions at $550 per user per month, the latter bundling one million Flex Credits per org per year alongside 2.5 million Data Services Credits for Data Cloud. The arithmetic is worth sitting with. A 6% increase on a $165 seat is roughly $10 per month. The AI tier asks for more than three times the base seat price. The list increase was the smaller half of the story by a wide margin.
HubSpot changed the unit, not just the number
HubSpot's March 2024 change was structural. In its announcement of the seats model, the company introduced Core Seats, which carry edit access to purchased Hubs and access to cross-platform AI features, and View-Only Seats, which the company describes as "free and unlimited for paid portals." Seat minimums for Sales Hub and Service Hub were removed outright.
HubSpot guided that migrating customers "may see a migration-related price increase of approximately 5% or less at the time of subscription renewal." That is a modest headline number, but it understates the redistribution underneath it. Organizations with many light-touch users — executives who read dashboards, finance staff who check pipeline — could push those people onto free View-Only Seats. Organizations whose users all needed edit rights absorbed a real increase. The same policy cut costs for one buyer profile and raised them for another.
Did the repricing actually grow vendor revenue?
Salesforce's fourth quarter fiscal 2026 results, covering the quarter ended January 31, 2026, reported revenue of $11.2 billion, up 12% year over year, with full-year FY26 revenue of $41.5 billion, up 10%. Subscription and support revenue reached $10.7 billion in the quarter, up 13%. Remaining performance obligation stood at $72.4 billion, up 14%, with current RPO at $35.1 billion, up 16%.
The AI line is where the repricing shows most clearly. Agentforce and Data 360 ARR exceeded $2.9 billion, up more than 200% year over year, with Agentforce ARR alone at $800 million, up 169%. Guidance for FY27 sits at $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion. Notably, subscription growth of 13% ran ahead of the 6% list increase, which means volume and product mix — not the price change by itself — did most of the work.
HubSpot's picture is instructive because the seats migration is nearly complete. On the company's Q4 2025 earnings call, management said roughly 90% of legacy customers had moved to the new pricing model, with close to half of ARR having passed through a first renewal on it. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at about $3.1 billion, up 18.2% in constant currency, with Q4 subscription revenue up 21%. Total customers passed 288,000, a 16% year-over-year increase, with more than 9,800 net additions in the quarter.
The engagement signal beneath the revenue
Two HubSpot metrics deserve attention together. Average subscription revenue per customer was $11,700 in Q4, and net revenue retention was 105% in the quarter and 103.5% for the full year. Customer count grew 16% while revenue per customer grew far more slowly. That is the signature of a pricing change that lowered the barrier to entry — removing seat minimums pulled in more, smaller accounts rather than extracting more from existing ones.
At the same time, larger deals accelerated. Deals above $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue grew 33% in 2025, deals above $10,000 grew 41%, and customers with 500 or more seats grew fivefold. Free View-Only Seats appear to have functioned as a distribution mechanism rather than a discount: giving read access away at no cost put the CRM in front of people who never would have been licensed under the old model, and some fraction of those eventually converted to paid Core Seats.
Consumption pricing is redefining what engagement means
The more consequential shift is the move from seats to actions. In May 2025 Salesforce introduced Flex Credits, sold in packs of 100,000 for $500, with a standard Agentforce action consuming 20 credits — roughly $0.10 per action. This replaced the earlier per-conversation approach that customers had criticized as unpredictable. Salesforce also added a Flex Agreement letting organizations convert between user licenses and credits.
HubSpot is running a parallel model. Management identified two distinct revenue levers on the Q4 call: Core Seat adoption and credits consumption. Customer Agent accounted for about 60% of credits consumed in the quarter, with more than 8,000 customers having activated it and resolution rates reported in the mid-60% range.
This changes the economics in a specific way. Under seat pricing, a customer who deploys a CRM to 200 people and uses it lightly pays the same as one who uses it constantly. Under credit pricing, cost tracks activity directly. That is fairer in principle and harder to budget in practice, and it means a successful AI deployment now increases your bill rather than amortizing a fixed cost across more work.
What should you do at your next renewal?
A few practical conclusions follow from the evidence above. Audit your user roster against seat tiers before renewal, because free view-only access at HubSpot and unchanged Starter and Foundations pricing at Salesforce both reward buyers who classify users accurately. Model AI add-ons separately from base seats, since a $125 or $550 per-user AI tier dwarfs a 6% list adjustment. And if you are evaluating consumption pricing, instrument your expected action volume first — at roughly $0.10 per Agentforce action, a high-volume support deployment reaches meaningful money quickly — and the triple-digit ARR growth both vendors report in these lines is a direct reflection of how fast customer consumption is climbing.