Krux implementation cost: pricing Data 360 after Audience Studio

Krux was a data management platform. Publishers and advertisers used it to collect behaviour from websites and apps, much of it through cookies and device identifiers, combine it with second and third-party data, build audience segments and push those segments to advertising platforms. After the acquisition it was renamed Salesforce Audience Studio. That product is gone. As the end-of-life notice put it: "Salesforce has officially announced that the End of Life date for Salesforce Audience Studio DMP (formerly known as Krux) is February 1, 2024."

There is nothing to implement under the Krux or Audience Studio name, and no way to restore it. What Salesforce sells for the work Krux used to do is Data 360, the product previously called Data Cloud. Salesforce's help documentation records the rename: "As of October 14, 2025, Data Cloud has been rebranded to Data 360." Data 360 is not a like-for-like DMP. It is built around first-party data and unified customer profiles rather than cookie pools, which changes both what you implement and what it costs. This page prices Data 360 as the replacement and sets out how an audience project on it is quoted.

#What Data 360 costs

Salesforce publishes Data 360 pricing. The figures below are from its Data 360 pricing page as at October 2026, shown in US dollars. The page notes that the information is for information purposes only and subject to change.

The free starting point is real and useful for a proof of concept. The FAQ says: "Salesforce customers can provision Data 360 for free with a limited amount of storage and consumption credits." That is enough to connect a few sources and test identity rules, not to run production audiences for a large brand.

Salesforce's own framing of the model is that bringing data in costs nothing and you pay when you use the data. In practice that means ingestion is not where the bill comes from. Processing, identity resolution, calculated insights, segmentation and activation consume credits, and the volume and frequency of those operations set the cost.

#Doing the arithmetic

The profile-based options make budgeting more predictable for an audience use case, because the main unit is the number of people you hold. A retailer with two million known customers on the Profiles option would pay 2,000 times $240, which is $480,000 a year at list, with 2 million Flex Credits included for additional work. On Enterprise Profiles the same base is $840,000 a year, with 4 million Flex Credits and access to the Ad Audience add-on that matters most to former Krux users.

The Flex Credit option suits smaller or more experimental programmes. A million credits at list is $5,000. How far that goes depends entirely on what you run and how often, which is why Salesforce points customers to its pricing calculator and to Digital Wallet, its free tool for monitoring consumption of usage-based products. Ask your implementation partner to produce a credit forecast from the calculator using your real source volumes and refresh schedules, and to show the assumptions behind it.

Two cautions apply. First, the profile count that matters is the number of unified profiles after identity resolution, not the number of rows you load. A messy source with many duplicates will look larger before unification. Second, a Krux user's instinct is to count anonymous cookies as audience. Data 360 can hold anonymous and known individuals, but a strategy that tries to keep every anonymous visitor as a profile will cost far more than one built around known customers and consented identifiers.

#Why a Krux-shaped requirement changes on Data 360

Krux was built for a world of third-party cookies, data marketplaces and programmatic advertising. Much of that world has narrowed. Browsers restrict third-party cookies, mobile platforms limit device identifiers, and privacy law in Australia, Europe and parts of the United States constrains how audience data can be collected and shared. A project that tries to rebuild the old DMP pattern on Data 360 will be expensive and may not be lawful.

The useful translation is from the job Krux did to the job Data 360 does. Krux built segments from behaviour and pushed them to ad platforms. On Data 360 you build segments from unified first-party profiles, combining CRM, commerce, service, marketing engagement and consented web and app behaviour, and activate them to Marketing Cloud Engagement, to advertising platforms through Ad Audiences, or to other systems. The same segment can drive an email, a paid campaign suppression list and a service agent's view of the customer. That breadth is the reason the product is priced as it is.

#What the implementation is made of

A Data 360 project for audience work breaks into these packages, and a quote should price each one.

Use case and source discovery. Agree the first two or three audience use cases, for example lapsed buyer win-back, paid media suppression of existing customers, and lookalike seed lists. Then list the sources each one needs. Discovery that starts from sources rather than use cases tends to ingest everything and activate nothing.

Data streams and connectors. Connect Salesforce clouds through native connectors, cloud storage and warehouses through the available connectors, and web and mobile behaviour through the SDKs. Anything without a native connector may need MuleSoft or a custom ingestion route, which adds effort and sometimes licence cost.

Data model mapping. Map each source to Data 360's data model objects. This is where most of the design effort lands, and where poor decisions show up later as broken segments.

Identity resolution. Design match and reconciliation rules for individuals across sources: email, phone, loyalty number, CRM ID and device identifiers where consented. Identity rules run on a schedule and consume credits, so the design should balance accuracy against frequency.

Calculated insights and segments. Build the metrics segments depend on, such as lifetime value or days since last purchase, then the segments themselves. Every refresh consumes credits, so agree how fresh each segment really needs to be.

Activation. Set up activation targets: Marketing Cloud Engagement, advertising platforms through Ad Audiences on the plans that include it, and any other destinations. Each target needs testing with real match rates.

Consent and governance. Map consent sources into Data 360 and make sure segments respect them. If you hold sensitive data, consider whether the Data Masking add-on on Enterprise Profiles is needed.

Testing, enablement and hypercare. Validate profile counts and segment sizes against known figures, train the marketers who will build segments, and watch credit consumption closely in the first months.

#A phased path that keeps the bill readable

Former Krux customers often arrive with a long list of segments and destinations and an expectation that all of them move at once. On Data 360 that is the costly way to start, because every source, rule and segment consumes credits from the day it goes live, and errors found late are paid for twice.

A steadier path has three phases. The first proves the core: connect the CRM and one behavioural or commerce source, build the identity rules, and deliver one segment to one destination, ideally a paid media suppression list, because its value is easy to measure. This phase can often run inside the free provisioning allowance or a small Flex Credit purchase, and it produces the real consumption data that the later forecast needs.

The second phase adds the remaining priority sources and two or three more use cases, and moves to the commercial option that fits, usually a profile-based plan once the unified count is known. The third phase widens activation to more destinations and hands segment building to the marketing team, with guardrails on refresh frequency.

Each phase should end with a short review of credit consumption against the forecast. If the numbers are drifting, the cause is almost always a refresh schedule, a duplicate stream or an identity rule that runs more often than the business needs. Fixing those early is cheap. Discovering them at renewal is not.

#Running costs after go-live

A DMP was often run by an agency or an ad operations team that logged in to build segments and push them out. Data 360 asks more of the organisation, because it sits under service, sales and marketing at once. Budget for an owner who understands both the data model and the consumption model, someone who can read Digital Wallet, explain a spike and decide whether a new use case justifies its credits.

There is also ongoing data engineering. New sources arrive, fields change upstream, and consent rules evolve. Each change touches streams, mappings or identity rules. A small retained capacity, whether in house or through a partner, is cheaper than a project every time a source system changes.

Salesforce releases new Data 360 capability three times a year, and some releases change how operations are metered or add cheaper ways to do the same work. Reviewing each release against your running configuration is a modest task that can pay for itself.

#How to get quotes you can compare

Give every bidder the same pack: the use cases in priority order, the sources with approximate record volumes and update frequency, the activation targets, your consent model, and the number of known customers you expect after unification. Ask each to price the packages above separately and to include a credit forecast that shows the operations, volumes and schedules it assumes.

Then compare the forecasts as carefully as the services figures. A low services quote paired with a design that refreshes everything hourly can cost more over a year than a higher quote with a disciplined refresh plan. Ask how each bidder would monitor consumption after go-live and who would act on it. Partners with audience and data platform depth are tested on who to hire for Krux, and the connection patterns are on integrating Krux with Salesforce.

#Costs that sit outside the quote

Source quality is the line most often missing. Identity resolution cannot fix keys that are wrong at source, and every rerun costs credits. Budget time to clean the main sources before you scale up.

Sandboxes and environments deserve a question too. Testing Data 360 changes safely means having somewhere other than production to try new streams, mappings and identity rules. Ask your account executive what your contract includes for testing environments and how consumption there is counted, and ask your implementation partner how they plan to promote changes from test to production without rebuilding them by hand.

Then there is the cost of switching off what you used in the meantime. Many Audience Studio customers moved to an interim tool, a customer data platform from another vendor or a set of direct uploads to ad platforms, after February 2024. Running that alongside Data 360 during the transition is sensible, but it doubles a line in the budget for as long as the overlap lasts. Agree a date for retiring the interim arrangement in the project plan, tied to a measurable test such as matching segment sizes and match rates in both systems for one month, so the overlap ends on evidence rather than drifting into a second renewal.

#Where this fits with the other Krux pages

The acquisition story is on what happened to Krux, and the end of Audience Studio is explained on the Krux and Audience Studio page. If any invoice still carries the old name, see the Krux licence cost page. If you are deciding whether Data 360 is the right destination at all, start with should I migrate from Krux, then come back here to price the option you choose.