Qualified licence cost after the Salesforce acquisition

Salesforce's announcement of the deal is a single line: "Salesforce completed its acquisition of Qualified on April 1, 2026." The product that came with it is Piper, which Qualified calls its AI SDR agent, running on what it calls its agentic marketing platform. This guide is about how that product is licensed. The work to connect it to your lead and contact records, route the conversations and test the handoffs is a separate cost, covered on the Qualified implementation cost page.

#The three published tiers

Qualified's pricing page names three tiers and publishes no prices. Each one says "Contact us". What it does publish is the capacity each tier includes and the features that change between them, which is more useful than it sounds, because it tells you what the quote will be built on. This is what we read on 13 October 2026.

Every plan also includes AI SDR Agent Studio, Agent Spotlight, account segmentation with waterfall enrichment, integrations with Salesforce CRM and more than twenty other go-to-market systems, reporting, routing and workflow actions in third-party systems.

Qualified describes the entry tier this way: "All of the basics to scale inbound pipeline generation with an SDR agent." and the top one as "Scale your SDR agent with infrastructure built for enterprise-wide deployment." The tier names are therefore a ladder of capacity and infrastructure, not a ladder of what the agent can do. The core abilities are in Premier. What you buy as you move up is room, plus a handful of capabilities that matter to larger or more regulated operations.

#What the unit of licence really is

There is no seat in this licence. The two numbers on the page, monthly web sessions and monthly active email contacts, are the meters. The page does not define either term. In ordinary usage a session is a visit to your site, and a monthly active email contact is presumably a person the agent engages by email in the month, though you should not rely on ordinary usage. Those two figures drive the tier you land on, and they are the first things any quote will ask for.

The steps between the tiers are large. Sessions rise eightfold from Premier to Enterprise and two and a half times from Enterprise to Ultimate. Email contacts rise fourfold and then by a little over two. A business that sits just above a threshold is paying for a great deal of headroom it does not use, and a business just below is probably at risk of a mid-term conversation about moving up. That is the best argument for measuring carefully before the first call.

A word on the contents of the page. The Ultimate tier lists "multiple agent profiles" as a feature, while its includes line says one SDR agent profile, as do the other two. That may simply mean you can add profiles above the first, and it is not clear whether they cost extra. It is the sort of detail worth a written answer.

#The definitions that decide the bill

The page gives numbers and not definitions, so every one of the following is a question for the order form.

First, what is a session? Does it include every visit to every page on your domain, or only visits to pages where the agent is deployed? Are bots, internal traffic and repeat visits within a short window counted? Your analytics tool and Qualified's counter may not agree, and the licence follows Qualified's.

Second, what is a monthly active email contact? Is it a person to whom the agent has sent an email in the month, a person who has replied, or anyone in a sequence? Is the count taken as a peak, an average or at month end?

Third, what happens at the limit? Is there a stated overage rate, an automatic move to the next tier, a throttle or a conversation at renewal? Each has a different effect on a busy month.

Fourth, how are the limits applied across a year? A business with a seasonal peak, such as a conference or a product launch, wants to know whether capacity is pooled across the term or reset monthly.

Fifth, whether waterfall enrichment is truly unlimited at your volume. The page lists it among what all plans include, and it is the kind of capability that may rely on third-party data lookups. Ask whether any usage cap applies.

#What the Salesforce connection costs you in tier terms

The page lists Salesforce CRM among the integrations on every plan, and it names Salesforce MCAE as an integration too. It lists a Salesforce sandbox as an Enterprise feature. If you are on Premier, that implies you may need to test the connection against production, or to move up a tier to get a safe place to do it. That is a licence consequence of a technical need, and it is worth noticing before you choose the tier on session count alone.

Ownership by Salesforce is not yet visible in the way the product is sold. The public pricing page still sends every tier to contact Qualified. Ask your account team whether future renewals will be on Qualified paper or Salesforce paper, whether the product can be added to a Salesforce agreement, and whether any Salesforce credits or Agentforce commitments can be applied. Do not assume that being part of Salesforce brings a discount, and do not assume it excludes one either.

#Contract and renewal mechanics

Qualified publishes no term, uplift or notice period, so ask for all three. Establish the minimum term and whether it is annual. Ask whether the tier can move up mid-term at the same rate and whether it can move down at renewal. Ask what is included in onboarding and support, and whether any professional services are bundled into the price or sold separately.

Ask what happens to your data if you leave. A conversation platform holds transcripts, buyer intent signals and routing history, which are valuable for training sales and for compliance. Make sure you can export them in a usable format and that deletion on exit is described.

Review sites publish estimates of what Qualified costs per year. They differ from one another, none of them is a Qualified document, and most predate the acquisition, so this guide does not use them. If you want a benchmark, ask two or three buyers of similar size what they actually pay, and treat the answer as one input and not the answer.

#How to size the licence

Pull twelve months of web sessions from your analytics tool, and split them by the pages where an agent would run. Find the median month and the peak month. If Qualified counts only sessions on pages with the widget, you may be able to deploy the agent on high-intent pages first and keep the count below a tier boundary. If it counts every session on the domain, that tactic does nothing.

For email contacts, count the distinct people you contact each month through your marketing automation, and ask how many of those would plausibly be handed to an agent. Be honest about the ones you would not. An agent that nurtures an entire database is a larger licence than one that works inbound leads.

Then choose the tier by comparing both numbers with the table. If one number fits Premier and the other fits Enterprise, you are in a negotiation about the higher one, and you should ask whether a custom tier can be built. The page itself says the plan is customised to your pipeline, so it is reasonable to ask.

#Three buyers on the same ladder

A software company with a busy but modest website, a few hundred thousand sessions a month and a small inbound lead flow, is the natural Premier customer. Its risk is the sandbox limitation and the lack of agent handoff to a human rep, two Enterprise features that a sales-led business will find it needs sooner than expected. Price Premier and Enterprise together and ask what the gap is, so that you know the cost of the upgrade before you need it.

A larger business with several million sessions, multiple regions and a CRM with a big contact database is an Enterprise or Ultimate buyer. For this buyer the dedicated IP address and the high volume contact allowance are the items worth examining, since they relate to email deliverability and to scale. If email is a major channel for the agent, ask how the sending reputation is handled and who owns it.

A product-led company converting free trials into revenue sits somewhere different again. Its volume of web sessions may be large because of the product site, while the number of contacts the agent works is small. The two meters pull in different directions, so ask whether the tier can be built around the number that matters and whether the other can be set generously.

#Traps worth naming

The first is the quiet threshold. Because the steps between tiers are large, a season of growth can push you over a limit without any change in the agent's value, so agree in advance what happens at the boundary. The second is the pilot that proves nothing: a trial on a low-traffic page shows the agent working and tells you little about the volumes you will pay for. Run the pilot where the traffic is. The third is paying for headroom you will never use. A tier chosen for next year's hoped-for traffic is a bet, and the contract should let you start lower and move up at an agreed rate. The fourth is the integration that is bought but not planned: the page lists the integrations and says nothing about who builds and tests them, so make sure that effort is in someone's plan.

#How to compare two offers

Compare Qualified against what it replaces or supplements, and do the sum on a full-year basis. Include the licence, the integration work, the time your team spends reviewing conversations, and the cost of the leads the agent will not handle. Compare also against the cost of human coverage for the same hours and channels. Ask every vendor to quote the same traffic and contact volumes so that you are comparing like with like. Finally, check what your existing email platform already does, so you do not pay for a capability twice.

#Where the other questions sit

The services fee and the handoff into the lead or contact belong on the Qualified page. Who bought the company belongs on what happened to Qualified. How a conversation meets a record, and the failure when it does not, belong on integrating Qualified with Salesforce. Whether to move belongs on should I migrate from Qualified.