An Agentforce action costs 10 cents, a conversation $2: how AI agents are billed now

01Five vendors, five meters: action, conversation, credit, token, seat

Salesforce offers three routes on its Agentforce price page. Flex Credits cost US$500 per 100,000, and each action, which Salesforce defines as “a specific function that an AI agent executes on the platform, such as updating a record, summarizing a complex case, answering a product inquiry”, draws 20 credits: US$0.10. A voice action draws 30, or US$0.15. The alternative is US$2 a conversation for customer-facing agents, whatever happens inside it. The two cannot run in the same org.¹

Microsoft sells Copilot Studio as tenant-wide packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits at US$200 a month, as a pay-as-you-go meter billed through an Azure subscription at month end, or as a one-year prepurchase plan that saves up to 20 percent.^{3 5} Its rate table charges 1 credit for a scripted answer, 2 for a generated one, 5 for an agent action and 10 for grounding an answer in the company’s Microsoft Graph data; a reasoning model adds 10 credits per 1,000 tokens.⁴

Zoho meters only the model. Its pricing page says Zia Agents are free; agents on Zoho-hosted models get 30 million tokens a month at no charge on the standard tier and 20 million on the pro tier, then pay US$1 or US$3 per million tokens from a prepaid wallet. External models are billed at the model vendor’s rate.⁷ Google prices the Gemini Enterprise app by the seat, US$21 a month for Business and US$30 for Standard or Plus, with agents built in its no-code designer running inside the seat’s quota. A pay-as-you-go edition with a $0 seat fee, for 20 or more seats, bills tokens, memory, compute and storage at standard rates; Google says it is “gradually rolling out”.⁹

ServiceNow moved every product to three tiers, Foundation, Advanced and Prime, on 9 April. Each combines per-seat licensing with meters such as assets under management and storage, plus a pool of AI tokens, and the ServiceNow executive who presented it declined to disclose prices.¹⁰

02The seat survived, and now it decides who gets metered

No vendor has dropped the per-user price. Salesforce sells Agentforce add-ons for Sales, Service and Field Service at US$125 a user a month, US$150 for its industry clouds, both described as “Unmetered Agentforce usage for employees”. Agentforce 1 Editions start at US$550 a user a month with the add-on and 2.5 million Flex Credits per org a year. For staff without a full CRM licence there is a US$5 Agentforce User License that “Requires Flex Credits”: a seat that opens the meter rather than replacing it.¹

Microsoft draws the same line by licence. Its rate table has a column headed “Used by Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed user”, and its rows for answers, actions and grounding read “No charge”, within fair-use limits, when an employee with a Copilot seat uses an internal agent under their own identity. A colleague without the seat who asks the same agent the same question spends credits.⁴ Microsoft 365 Copilot is US$30 a user a month paid yearly; Copilot Business, for up to 300 users, lists at US$21, discounted to US$18 for the first year on purchases made from 1 July to 31 December 2026. Even inside the seat, Copilot Cowork, the long-running task agent, is marked “Metered”.^{3 6}

A seat, in other words, is now insurance against the meter: worth buying for the few people who use agents all day, while the long tail runs on credits.

03One month, worked through: ₹3.35 lakh with GST

Take a 400-person Indian services firm. It runs Salesforce Service Cloud for 40 service reps and Microsoft 365 for everyone, with 50 managers on Copilot seats. Those seats are last year’s budget line; the question is the new metered one. Three agents run in a month, on assumptions that are ours.

At ₹94.95 to the dollar, the European Central Bank’s reference rates for 1 September,¹¹ the month is US$2,992, or ₹2,84,090, plus ₹51,136 of GST at 18 percent: ₹3,35,226.¹² The 50 Copilot users ask the same help agent at no charge.⁴

The meter is the risk. If the customer chats average six actions instead of three, that line doubles to US$3,600, ₹3,41,820 before tax. The same 6,000 chats on conversation pricing would be US$12,000, ₹11,39,400, and the 40 reps on the flat add-on US$5,000, ₹4,74,750. On the Microsoft side, 8,000 of the 50,000 credits go unused and lapse; and if usage reaches 125 percent of prepaid capacity, 62,500 credits, Microsoft disables the custom agents until capacity is added, unless a pay-as-you-go meter is linked.^{1 4 5}

04Six terms to put in the order form

The price pages already say what happens at the edges, and the edges are where a metered bill goes wrong. These are the terms we would ask for, in order of what they protect.

Salesforce’s FAQ: “Unused Flex Credits do not roll over into subsequent subscription terms,” and “There is no overage penalty. If you exceed your entitlement, your rate is your contracted rate billed monthly in arrears.”¹ Microsoft’s licensing page: “Copilot Studio enforces purchased capacity monthly, and unused Copilot Credit don’t carry over to the next month.”⁵ Each of those sentences is a term to negotiate rather than accept.