RelateIQ implementation cost: Sales Cloud and Einstein Activity Capture pricing

RelateIQ was built for small, fast sales teams that hated data entry. It connected to a rep's inbox and calendar, captured every email and meeting automatically, and used that history to show who knew whom, which deals had gone quiet and what needed a follow-up. Salesforce bought it, renamed it SalesforceIQ and sold it for a while as a lighter CRM for small businesses. Then it closed. In one line: "Acquired by salesforce.com in 2014 for close to $400 million, the company's product was retired in 2020."

That means a RelateIQ implementation has no price. Nobody can sell you SalesforceIQ, and any proposal to implement it is either years out of date or using the name loosely. What a buyer can price is the thing RelateIQ's ideas turned into inside Salesforce: Sales Cloud with Einstein Activity Capture. That is the subject of the rest of this page, including the published licence prices, what the setup work involves and what is easy to leave out of a quote.

#What replaced RelateIQ inside Salesforce

The automatic capture that defined RelateIQ survives as Einstein Activity Capture, a Sales Cloud feature that connects to Google or Microsoft mailboxes and calendars. Salesforce's Trailhead module on the feature describes the core behaviour plainly: "Emails and events that reps send and receive are automatically added to the activity timeline of related records." Reps stop logging emails by hand, and managers see activity on accounts and opportunities without asking for it.

The same module lists the editions where it is supported as Starter, Professional, Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited, using Salesforce's older edition names, and explains that every Sales Cloud seat comes with a matching Einstein Activity Capture Standard seat. Standard has limits. Activity metrics and recommended connections are not available in the Standard version, and other insight features differ between Standard and the paid versions that come with higher editions or add-ons. If your memory of RelateIQ is mostly about relationship scoring and dashboards of who is engaged, check exactly which of those you get in the edition you plan to buy.

#What Sales Cloud costs

Salesforce publishes Sales Cloud prices. The table below is from its Sales Cloud pricing page as at October 2026, in US dollars per user per month. The page notes that pricing is provided for information only and is subject to change, and it shows local currency figures too; Starter Suite, for example, is AU$35 per user per month.

Two notes on the page matter for a former RelateIQ team. The first is about AI: "AI can be added to Core and above." If the relationship insight you want depends on Einstein features beyond basic capture, the lower suites will not get you there. The second is in the comparison table, where Activity Capture appears among the built-in AI features listed for Max. Read the comparison for the edition you are considering, line by line, against the features you expect.

The licence arithmetic is quick. A team of twelve sellers on Pro Suite is 12 times US$100 times 12, or US$14,400 a year at list. The same team on Core is US$28,080, and on Advanced US$56,880. RelateIQ was sold to teams of roughly this size, and the jump between suites is the most important budget decision on the page.

#Picking the edition

Former RelateIQ users tend to fall into two groups, and the edition choice follows from which one you are in.

The first group is a small team that wants a clean CRM, automatic email capture and a pipeline view. Starter Suite or Pro Suite covers that, and the setup work is small. The risk is buying too little: if you later need territory rules, complex approvals or a richer integration, moving up mid-year means retraining and sometimes reworking automation.

The second group is a larger or growing sales organisation that wants the relationship intelligence RelateIQ promised: who knows the buyer, which deals are going cold, and what to do next. That points to Core or above, plus a careful look at which Activity Capture and Einstein features are included. Advanced and Max carry more of the forecasting and AI capability, but they also carry more configuration, and the licence step is large.

A useful exercise before you talk to Salesforce is to write the five things a sales manager should see each Monday, then test which edition delivers each one out of the box. That turns a feature comparison into a decision you can defend.

#What the implementation involves

A Sales Cloud project for a small or mid-sized team is not large, but the Activity Capture part has specific work that general CRM quotes sometimes skip. A comparable quote should price these packages.

Discovery and design. Agree the sales process, stages, required fields and the reports managers will use. Keep it short for a small team, but do not skip it, because stage definitions drive every pipeline report.

Data migration. Many teams that lost SalesforceIQ moved to spreadsheets, another CRM or a mix. Migration means cleaning accounts, contacts and open opportunities, deciding how much activity history is worth loading, and loading in the right order. Historical emails are usually not worth migrating; Activity Capture starts collecting from the date it is switched on.

Activity Capture configuration. Connect the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant, define which users are in which configuration, and decide what to exclude, such as internal emails, personal domains or sensitive addresses. Agree sharing settings for captured activity, because the default visibility will not suit every team. Salesforce has added options to sync captured emails as Salesforce activity records, and whether you use them affects reporting and storage.

Privacy and compliance. Capturing every rep's email is a significant data processing decision. Your privacy officer should review what is captured, where it is stored, who can see it and how long it is kept. In regulated industries, add a check against record keeping rules.

Integrations. Most small teams need email, calendar and perhaps a quoting or e-signature tool. Larger teams add marketing automation and an ERP link for orders. Price each integration separately.

Training and adoption. Show reps what is captured and what is not, and show managers the reports. Adoption is cheap when reps see that the tool removes work.

Hypercare. A few weeks of support after go-live to fix capture exclusions, sharing questions and report tweaks.

#What drives effort up or down

The size of the mailbox estate matters less than its tidiness. One Google Workspace tenant with clean user accounts is simple. Several Microsoft 365 tenants after acquisitions, shared mailboxes and reps using personal addresses all add work and testing.

Data quality in the migration source is the next factor. A spreadsheet with duplicated companies and contacts takes time to clean, and loading it uncleaned undermines the very relationship view RelateIQ users valued.

Reporting ambition is third. Out-of-the-box activity reports are fine for many teams. Custom dashboards that blend captured activity with pipeline and forecast data take more design and depend on the capture storage choice above.

#Capture is not the same as relationship intelligence

It is easy to buy Activity Capture expecting RelateIQ and to be disappointed. RelateIQ's appeal was not just that emails appeared on records. It was that the product drew conclusions from them: which colleague had the strongest link to a buyer, which threads had stalled, and who should follow up. Capture is the raw material for those conclusions. Turning it into something a manager acts on takes design.

Start with the data model. Relationship views depend on contacts being attached to the right accounts and opportunities, with roles that mean something. If contact roles are optional and nobody fills them, captured emails attach to records loosely and the insight is weak. A small amount of required data, enforced at the right stage, makes the captured activity far more useful.

Then decide what "going cold" means for your sales cycle. A transactional team might treat five quiet days as a warning; an enterprise team selling twelve-month deals might allow a month. Writing that rule down lets you build a simple report or list view, in any edition, that flags stalled opportunities from captured activity dates. On higher editions some of this comes as built-in insight, but the rule still needs to match how your team sells.

Finally, think about account teams. RelateIQ was popular with founders and small teams where everyone sold. In a larger organisation, the person with the strongest relationship may be a solutions engineer or an executive sponsor who never touches the opportunity. Including those people in Activity Capture, with appropriate sharing, is often what makes the relationship picture complete. It also adds seats, which is a cost decision to make on purpose.

#Running costs after the first year

Year two looks different from year one. The migration and setup are done, and the costs that remain are seats, any add-ons, storage growth and the time of whoever runs the org. Captured activity accumulates steadily, and if you sync emails as Salesforce activity records, storage use grows with it. Check the storage position after six months and plan for it in the renewal rather than discovering an overage.

Salesforce releases changes three times a year, and Activity Capture has had meaningful changes in recent releases. Someone should read the release notes for Sales Cloud and Activity Capture each time, test any change to capture behaviour in a sandbox, and tell reps what is different. That is a few hours per release for a small org, but skipping it is how capture settings drift and reps lose trust in what they see.

Renewal is also when edition decisions can be revisited cheaply. If the team has grown into needs that sit in a higher edition, move then, with training planned, rather than mid-term.

#How to get quotes you can compare

Send each bidder the same brief: number of users by role, the edition you intend to buy, the mail platform and number of tenants, the migration source and record counts, the integrations needed and the Monday reports managers expect. Ask them to price discovery, migration, Activity Capture configuration, privacy review support, each integration, training and hypercare separately. Ask which Activity Capture features they assume are included in your edition, and have them name any add-on they think you will need.

Partners are tested on who to hire for RelateIQ, and integration patterns for email and calendar are on integrating RelateIQ with Salesforce.

#Costs that are easy to miss

Licence timing is the other quiet cost. If seats start on signature and the migration takes two months, you pay for two months of a CRM nobody uses. For a small team the sum is modest, but it is avoidable: either sign close to go-live or ask for a start date that matches the plan. The same applies in reverse to whatever tool the team uses today. Agree the date the old system or spreadsheet is switched off, so the team is not paying for two places to keep customer data and, worse, keeping half of it in each.

The edition step-up is the big one. Teams often buy the cheapest suite that looks sufficient and find six months later that the insight they wanted is in a higher edition. Settling that during discovery is far cheaper than an upgrade with retraining mid-contract.

#Where this fits with the other RelateIQ pages

The acquisition and the shutdown are covered on what happened to RelateIQ, and the product history is on the RelateIQ and SalesforceIQ page. For the licence side in more depth, see the RelateIQ licence cost page. If you are weighing Sales Cloud against other options, should I migrate from RelateIQ sets out the choice, and this page gives you the numbers.