Moonhub licence cost: Salesforce never sold it, so price the replacement

Two statements about Moonhub appeared on the same day in June 2025, and they disagree. The first said that a young company building AI tools for hiring had been bought by Salesforce. The second, added the same afternoon, said it had not. If you are here to find out what a Moonhub licence costs, the second statement decides the answer: there is no Salesforce licence, because there was no Salesforce product.

This page sorts out who you would have been contracting with, what to ask if you were a customer, and, for readers who simply want a hiring assistant inside Salesforce, what that would cost to license using the rates Salesforce publishes for Agentforce. It has a different shape from the other licence pages in this set, because the usual question about what a post-acquisition licence costs does not apply.

#What was announced, and what was corrected

The original TechCrunch story opened with a claim that has since been walked back: "Salesforce has quietly snapped up Moonhub, a startup building AI to vet and hire talent." It reported that Moonhub's own post said its whole Menlo Park team would be joining Salesforce, and that Salesforce had been both a customer and an early investor in the company.

Then came the correction, added to the top of the same article: "A Salesforce spokesperson told TechCrunch that Moonhub has not, in fact, been acquired (by the company’s definition of the term). Rather, Moonhub is shutting down, and only some of the company’s team, not the whole team, as MoonHub implied in its post about the news, will be joining Salesforce."

Take the pieces of that one at a time. Salesforce does not describe the transaction as an acquisition by its own definition of the word. Moonhub, the company, is closing. The people who joined are a subset, which Salesforce says is smaller than Moonhub's post implied. The article does not say what happens to Moonhub's customers or their contracts, and it does not describe any product that moved to Salesforce. So the first fact to carry into any budget conversation is a negative one: no Moonhub offering exists on a Salesforce order form, and none was announced.

The story of the deal itself is on what happened to Moonhub. For the connection question, see integrating Moonhub with Salesforce, and for anyone who ran the software, should you migrate from Moonhub. The longer treatment of the company and its history is at Moonhub and Salesforce.

#Whose contract was it?

If you were a Moonhub customer, your agreement was with Moonhub, not with Salesforce, and the Salesforce statement in the article does not change that. Nothing in the record says Salesforce took on Moonhub's customer contracts, and it would be a mistake to assume it did, or to assume a refund or a transition credit will arrive from Salesforce.

Write to the company, and keep the reply. Ask four things. First, the date on which service ends and what happens to anything in flight. Second, whether any prepaid fees are refundable and on what basis. Third, how to export your data, in what format, and by when. Fourth, how and when your data will be deleted, and whether they will confirm deletion in writing. If a recruiter's notes, candidate profiles or search criteria were stored there, that is personal data about real people, and the deletion step matters as much as the export.

Do not ask your Salesforce account team to confirm anything about Moonhub's contracts, because they cannot speak for another company's agreements. You can, however, ask them what Salesforce offers for the job you were using Moonhub to do, which is the next part.

#Pricing the same job on Agentforce

Salesforce has not announced a recruiting product to replace Moonhub, and this page does not claim there is one. What Salesforce does sell is Agentforce, a platform on which a team can build its own agent to do a defined job, such as reading a role description, screening candidate records held in Salesforce and drafting a shortlist for a human to review. A build like that is a services project, but the platform side has published rates, which the Agentforce pricing page lists as at 11 October 2026.

The page defines the unit this way: "Agentforce actions are 20 Flex Credits, while Agentforce Voice actions are 30 Flex Credits." The arithmetic that turns credits into dollars is mine, not the page's: 100,000 credits buy 5,000 actions at 20 credits each, so one action costs $0.10.

The employee-facing seat is described in one line: "Deploy Agentforce agents company wide for all your employees." It carries a note that it requires Flex Credits, so the five dollars buys access and the usage is still metered.

#A worked example, clearly labelled as an illustration

Imagine a recruiting team of ten that wants an agent to screen inbound candidate records against open roles. Say each screen is a single action, and the team screens 2,000 records a month.

At 20 credits each, that is 40,000 credits, which at $500 per 100,000 is $200 a month. Add ten employee seats at $5 and the platform list cost is $250 a month, or $3,000 a year. If the same job takes five actions per record, because the agent reads a profile, checks a role, scores a match, drafts a note and updates a record, usage rises to 10,000 actions and $1,000 a month, so the licence line is now $1,050.

Now compare the external route. If you wanted a candidate-facing chat agent, answering questions about roles and the process, the per-conversation model applies at $2 each. A thousand conversations is $2,000 a month. Whichever side of the line you land on, the main message is that the number of actions per task, not the number of seats, drives the bill, and nobody can tell you that number until the agent is designed.

These figures use list prices and invented volumes. They are for shaping a conversation with your account executive, not for a budget. The published page does not say how any particular recruiting task would be counted, so ask for the counting rule for your use case in writing before you commit to a volume.

#The rules that catch buyers

Three rules on the page matter more than the headline rates.

First, you cannot mix the two consumption models in one org. The page states it plainly: "Flex Credits and Conversations will not be supported in the same org." A team that starts with candidate-facing conversations and later adds internal screening cannot simply add the second model alongside the first. Choose with the full roadmap in mind, and ask what a switch would involve.

Second, unused Flex Credits do not roll over into a later term, according to the same page. Buying a large block to get a better rate is only sensible if you are confident you will use it. A hiring agent is seasonal in most organisations, with bursts around campaigns and quiet periods between, which is exactly the pattern where an oversized block expires unused.

Third, going over is not an error. The page says: "If you exceed your entitlement, your rate is your contracted rate billed monthly in arrears." That is kinder than a hard stop, but it means a bug that loops, or a campaign that triples volume, shows up as an invoice. Ask for the alerting that is available and decide in advance who receives it.

#Hiring is not an ordinary workload

A licence does not cover the obligations that come with automating decisions about people. Screening candidates touches personal data, can introduce bias if the criteria or the data are skewed, and in some places attracts specific legal duties about notice, fairness and human review. Those obligations belong to the employer, not the platform vendor, and they cost time: policy, testing, review of outcomes, a way for a candidate to ask for a human.

Budget for them separately from the licence, and keep a human decision-maker in the loop for anything that affects whether a person is hired. If the idea for the agent came from a Moonhub demonstration, check that what you build does not claim abilities the original never demonstrated to you.

#What the licence does not cover

The platform rates above are the cheap part of a hiring agent. The larger part is the work that makes the agent trustworthy, and none of it appears on a price list. Someone has to decide which candidate fields the agent may read, and which it must never use. Someone has to write the instructions that tell it how to compare a record with a role, and build a test set of past candidates, with known outcomes, so that you can see whether its shortlist resembles a good recruiter's. Someone has to design the review step in which a person accepts, edits or rejects each suggestion, and record those decisions so that errors can be traced.

Treat those as a services scope and ask each partner to price them as separate lines: data access, instructions and testing, the review workflow, and the reporting that shows how the agent is behaving month by month. A quote that offers only a single figure for the agent leaves you unable to tell what is included, and unable to compare it with a rival's. The licence line from this page then sits beside the services lines as a published, checkable number, which is exactly where you want it.

If the agent will speak to candidates directly, add a line for the conversation design itself: what it may say about a role, what it must hand to a human, and how a candidate can opt out. Those rules matter more to your reputation than the rate per conversation.

#Questions for your account executive

Bring a short list to the first call. Which pricing model does Salesforce recommend for an internal screening agent, and why. How is a candidate-screening task counted in actions, and can you show the count for a worked example. What is the rate for credits beyond the entitlement, and is it the contracted rate. Do unused credits expire at the end of the term. Can alerts be set to a threshold you choose, and who receives them. And what would it take to move from one model to the other later, given that the page says the two cannot sit in the same org.

Write the answers into the order form or an annex, not an email, so that they survive a change of account executive.

#Comparing offers

You will probably compare three paths: a standalone recruiting tool from another vendor, an agent built on Agentforce, and doing nothing new. Put them on the same footing by asking for the cost of one hired candidate's worth of work: how many records are screened, how many actions or outcomes that produces, and what the total is at your volume.

For a standalone vendor, ask what is counted as a unit, whether the rate changes at volume, and what happens to your data on exit. The Moonhub episode is a reasonable argument for putting data-export and wind-down terms in every contract, whoever the vendor is.

For Agentforce, ask for the counting rule, the model, the term and the overage rate, and ask what your existing Salesforce agreement already includes. The cheapest platform line is the one you already hold.

#Where this leaves you

If Moonhub was a customer relationship of yours, deal with Moonhub first: end date, refund, export, deletion. If it was an idea you encountered in the news, set the acquisition aside, because it did not happen in the way first reported, and price the job on the platform you actually run. The published Agentforce rates give you a place to start, and the volumes are the part only your own design can supply.