Waii licence cost after the Salesforce acquisition

Waii was a natural-language-to-SQL company, and the question buyers keep asking is what a licence for it costs now. The short answer is that nobody sells one. When we tried waii.ai on 13 October 2026 it redirected to Salesforce's Data 360 pages. There is no Waii edition, no Waii seat and no Waii meter left to haggle over. If you want the capability, you buy the platform it was folded into, and that platform has a public price list worth reading carefully.

Salesforce's announcement describes Waii as "a leading enterprise-grade natural language-to-SQL platform" whose technology "translates plain-language questions into complex, production-ready SQL queries". It says Salesforce plans to integrate the company into Data Cloud and to use its metadata knowledge graph in Agentforce and Tableau Next. The completion record is one dated sentence: "Salesforce completed its acquisition of Waii on August 15, 2025." The same data product has since been renamed, and Salesforce's help text says: "As of October 14, 2025, Data Cloud has been rebranded to Data 360."

#What the announcement tells you about the licence

Read the announcement for what it commits to, because it is easy to over-read. Salesforce said it planned to integrate Waii into Data Cloud, which is now Data 360, and to let the technology power agentic workflows across the platform. It also said the technology would underpin the next-generation semantic engine in Tableau. Those are statements about where the engineering goes. None of them says that a Waii capability is free inside an existing Data 360 contract, that it carries a surcharge, or that it appears as a named action on a rate card.

So the safe working assumption is the boring one. You license Data 360 (and, if you use it, Agentforce or Tableau) on their normal terms, and you ask your account team in writing whether any plain-language query feature is a separate line, a metered action or an inclusion. Until that answer arrives, do not budget a Waii premium or assume a Waii discount.

#Data 360 list prices, read 13 October 2026

Salesforce publishes two ways to buy Data 360 on its pricing page. The page prints dollar amounts without a currency code, so confirm the currency on your quote.

Source: Salesforce Data 360 pricing, read 13 October 2026. The page says it is for information only and subject to change.

The page's own sentence is that Flex Credits are "One simple credit that can be applied towards any Data 360 action" and that you can pre-purchase, pay as you go or pre-commit. It also says credits can be moved between Data 360 and Agentforce, which matters if you will run both.

#What costs money and what does not

Data 360 charges for actions, not for getting data in. The page lists batch ingestion and zero-copy integration as free, and it names the actions you pay for: processing unstructured data, prep, unification, segmentation, activation, data queries, zero-copy sharing, and streaming or real-time pipelines. On the comparison grid, ingestion is free on all three models, while unstructured processing, queries and streaming are "Tied to Usage" on all three.

That last point is where a plain-language SQL feature would live if it is metered at all. A question asked in natural language becomes a query, and queries are a metered action. I want to be careful here. The action list we read does not name Waii, text-to-SQL or natural-language query. It is reasonable to expect that a question costs whatever the resulting query costs, but that is an inference you should have confirmed, not a fact the page establishes. Ask which action a plain-language question consumes, how many credits it takes, and whether the answer changes when the question reaches an external warehouse through zero-copy access.

#Worked arithmetic on list prices

These are straight multiplications of the published rates, before any discount, tax or negotiated term. They show the shape of the choice rather than a quote.

Suppose you unify 500,000 customer profiles. On Profiles that is 500 blocks of 1,000 at $240, or $120,000 a year, and the 1 Flex Credit per profile that comes with it is 500,000 credits. At the pay-as-you-go rate of $500 per 100,000, those credits have a list value of $2,500. On Enterprise Profiles the same base is $210,000 a year with 1,000,000 credits.

Now suppose you instead buy credits only. A purchase of 10 million credits is 100 blocks at $500, or $50,000. Whether that is cheaper depends entirely on how many credits your actions burn. A customer with few profiles and heavy query traffic may do better on credits. A customer with a large profile base and light queries will see profile pricing's fixed cost dominate. The page itself says Flex Credits offer the most flexibility while Profiles offer flat pricing with predictable billing, and it suggests Profiles suit use cases built on a unified profile, such as personalised journeys.

#Free provisioning and the older credit model

Salesforce states that "Salesforce customers can provision Data 360 for free with a limited amount of storage and consumption credits." That is useful for a proof of concept, and it is worth asking how large the free allowance is before you rely on it, since the page says only "limited".

If you are already on Data Services Credits, the page says there is "no forced migration" and you can stay on that model. Moving to Flex Credits or Profile pricing means swapping all your existing Data Services Credits, so a partial move is not on offer. That is a decision to take at renewal, with a comparison of how your last year's consumption would have priced under each model. The Data Services rate card is published separately, and you should compare against it rather than against memory.

#Billing, monitoring and the contract

How Data 360 usage reaches your invoice depends on how the org is contracted. Salesforce says a Monthly Usage Summary is emailed to the billing contact each month, and offers a free Digital Wallet tool for near real-time consumption data, plus a pricing calculator for estimating credits by use case. Put the Wallet on your go-live checklist. Consumption pricing punishes surprises, and a runaway query pattern is cheaper to catch in week one than on the first invoice.

Clauses worth reading before you sign: whether credits expire at term end, whether unused credits roll over, the rate for top-ups mid-term, the overage rate if you exhaust a pre-purchase, and what happens to profile counts if your unified base grows during the year.

#The cost outside Salesforce

A plain-language query that reaches your own warehouse runs on that warehouse's meter as well. Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and the like each bill compute their own way, and zero-copy access lets Data 360 read that data without copying it, which moves the compute cost rather than removing it. Ask who pays for it, whether queries are rate-limited, and how you will attribute the spend. This is a design question as much as a licence one, and it is covered on the Waii, plain-language SQL and Data 360 rename page.

#Right-sizing and comparing offers

Count profiles you will actually unify in year one, not every contact in every system, and decide whether the number is stable or likely to double. Estimate credit use by listing the actions per month for each use case: ingestion volume (free), prep and unification runs, segments built and refreshed, and queries. Use the calculator for the credit total and treat its output as an estimate to challenge.

When you compare a Salesforce quote with a standalone text-to-SQL tool, line up the unit (profile, credit, query, seat), the included allowances, the overage rule, the term, the renewal cap and the exit. A cheap seat price for a standalone tool tells you little if it needs a separately licensed semantic layer and warehouse.

#Which model suits which buyer

The page itself frames the choice as flexibility against predictability, and three common positions show how that plays out.

A marketing team building audiences from a large customer base, with segmentation and activation as the main actions, sits naturally on profile pricing. The unification and segment work that would otherwise burn credits is bundled, the bill is flat and the finance team can forecast it. The limits to watch are the stated caps. Profiles lists 100 segments and Enterprise Profiles 500, and a programme with more audiences than that needs a conversation before launch.

An analytics team that mostly queries data already sitting in a warehouse, with few profiles to unify, is closer to a credits buyer. Ingestion and zero-copy access cost nothing to set up, and spend follows query volume. That pattern is where plain-language questions are likeliest to appear, and it is also where an uncontrolled rollout can raise a bill quickly, so set a monitoring routine in the Digital Wallet from the first week.

A service organisation using unified profiles to drive agent actions may need both, because profile building is bundled in the profile models while the queries and processing that feed agents are still credit-based. The page says as much: profile pricing still uses Flex Credits for non-profile use cases such as querying data or processing unstructured data for AI agents. That sentence is a reminder that a profile price is not an all-in price.

#Questions for your account team

Put these in writing and file the answers with the order form. Which action does a plain-language question consume, and how many credits does it take? Is any Waii-derived capability in Data 360 or Tableau a separate SKU, a metered action or included? How are profiles counted, and when does a customer with duplicate records pay for both versions? Do the included credits expire, and can they be pooled with Agentforce? What is the top-up rate mid-term? If we are on Data Services Credits today, what does our last twelve months of usage cost under the new models?

If any answer arrives as "it depends", ask what it depends on and have that written into the contract.

#A note on renewals

Consumption models make the first renewal the real negotiation. By then you will have a year of actual credit burn, which is the only trustworthy forecast, so ask for the Digital Wallet export before the conversation and compare it with what you pre-purchased. If you consumed well under your commitment, ask for a smaller block or a longer rollover. If you consumed well over it, ask for a lower top-up rate in exchange for a larger commitment. Either way, avoid renewing on the strength of the original estimate.

#Where this page stops

This is the licence page. For the deal itself see what happened to Waii. For how a question reaches your tables and which grants apply, see integrating Waii with Salesforce. For leaving a Waii arrangement, see should you migrate from Waii. Scope and implementation work sits on the Waii and Data 360 page.

#The short version for procurement

Four lines will do. Salesforce completed the Waii acquisition on 15 August 2025 and plans to integrate it into Data 360. Waii is not sold on its own. Data 360 lists Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000, Profiles at $240 per 1,000 profiles a year and Enterprise Profiles at $420, as at 13 October 2026. Ask in writing which action a plain-language question consumes and whether it is included, metered or priced separately.