Sometimes Salesforce surprises, like a few years back when they introduced the Integration license and gave 5 of them for free in every org.
Now – I mean it is for some time already, but I finally really used it at one client – you can get Platform licenses for free as well.
As SalesforceBen listed in their article, you get 600 Platform Login Licenses when you enable Salesforce Foundations.
But here is the catch, as the license is not available immediately after activating Foundations. The only one you will see is 601 of Einstein Agent and 20 200 of External Apps Login.
You need to reach out to your AE and ask them to add the ‚Agentforce 360 Platform — Login and Dev Provisioning‘ SKU into your contract, which is free of charge. Once signed and a bit of wait you will get Platform Logins into your org. Surprisingly we got 12 000 of them, when I expected only 600, maybe it is somehow linked to the related information in the article – „600 annual logins with 30,000 credits“ but I’m still not able to do the math.
What do to with that?
Login license is not like a regular license, you pay/use it for every login by those users, but counting only once for each user during 24 hours. Meaning if the user will login every working day (let’s say 200 days per year) you have enough for 60 people – wow!
Platform license works almost like any other license, there are just a few objects it cannot access such as Leads or Opportunities. But Accounts, Contacts, Tasks, Events, custom objects, etc are available and can be used.
You will also notice why Salesforce has been pushing for Permission Sets for a while – you need to have a different profile for Login users and it is quiet annoying to setup everything twice. Minimum profile extended with relevant permission sets will save you a lot of work.
External Apps Login
Actually what about the other license you get as well? Again, these licenses are used per login, as the name suggest you can use it only for external users (not internal) and they will be able to access Salesforce only via Experience Cloud. Generally they behave as Customer Community license which means less possibilities to share data, managing users via accounts & contacts and a few other things. And they have access only to CRM objects (meaning NO access to leads, cases, opportunities primarily) but you can probably still find some use-case for what to use it.
All those tricky flex-credits
Yes, to enable Foundations you need to enable Data Cloud and we all heard the story about pay-as-you-go, consumption credits, etc. A lot of people are super scared about this, even though Salesforce tried to minimize the risk with all the extra reporting.
From my experience when you just enable these things it doesn’t consume any credits and you are still getting the benefits mentioned above. Already 2 of mine customers are using extra licenses they’ve got for free and so far don’t complain.