Platform Users: Cheap and Powerful

It's funny, I've written about platform events several times (here and here and here), but I seem to have barely mentioned platform users (only here). Time to rectify that!

Clarification

Once I started writing, I realized I could be creating some confusion. So: Platform events and platform users are two totally different things, completely unrelated. They are united only by having the word "platform" in their names.

What are Platform Licenses?

Platform Licenses are the user licenses you can purchase if you truly do not need a user to access Sales Cloud or Service Cloud features. As their name implies, they grant access to the Salesforce platform but not to Sales Cloud nor Service Cloud.

If you thought that sounded like a non-answer, because you don't even think of Sales Cloud or Service Cloud as separate from the platform, you are not alone. For reasons that I think have mainly to do with company history (and technical debt), the products that we usually think of as a generic "Salesforce license" are actually Sales Cloud licenses. These allow full access to the Salesforce platform as well as access to some things that Salesforce considers part Sales Cloud (Opportunities, Campaigns), even if we usually just consider them a standard part of the platform. Service Cloud licenses, similarly, are 99% about access to the platform, though purchasing a Service Cloud license also comes with some Service Cloud features (like Knowledge and Entitlements). Particularly in the nonprofit world, where the P10 grant of free licenses gives Sales+Service licenses, we rarely consider whether there is a difference between one "user license" and another. [I've written about making sure that when a nonprofit purchases their 11th and later licenses they should only pay for Sales Cloud licenses, because they don't need Sales+Service.] All that is to say that, other than in the context of certifications, in my experience most Salesforce professionals barely even think about Sales Cloud as a somehow different "product" than Service Cloud. We know, intellectually, that the Case object is part of Service Cloud—and are reminded of if when we have to go to Setup>Feature Settings>Service>Case Assignment Rules—but it rarely matters.

Salesforce doesn't help make the distinction clear either. If you go to Setup>Company Information>User Licenses, your Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Sales+Service licenses all show as just "Salesforce"

while your platform licenses are on a line marked "Salesforce Platform." Because of this (and to make myself part of the problem), I usually refer to Sales or Service Cloud licenses as "full licenses" to distinguish them from "platform licenses."

In practice, users on platform licenses are just another user. They can log into the system, can create and edit records, view reports and dashboards, trigger the firing of automation, run screen flows, etc. Because those users don't have Sales Cloud or Service Cloud there are some standard objects they can't access (including Opportunities and Campaigns). But there are a lot more that they can access. And they can access custom objects that you have created or that are part of managed packages (such as NPSP or PMM).

To add a bit more complexity, platform licenses also come in two levels, Platform Starter and Platform Plus. Besides a difference in price, the distinction between those two is that Starter are only allowed to access ten custom objects, where Plus can access up to 110. Both of those counts are of your org's custom objects. Objects installed by managed packages do not count against this limit. (And as I noted when I wrote about stacking, it's possible to give access to more than ten objects for platform Starter users.)

One last distinction to think about for platform licenses: You will need different profiles and may need different permission sets to go with platform licenses. Most of the time you can work with platform users exactly the same as other users on full licenses. But every so often you'll find some place where you need to work slightly differently for them. For example, you will need a baseline profile for your platform users that is different from your baseline profile for full users (because profiles are always tied to license type Or if you have a baseline permission set that grants access to all the objects and fields your organization users have in common and it includes Campaigns, you won't be able to use that permset for platform users (because they can't access Campaigns).

Usage

So how do I use platform licenses with my clients? They're a way to save money! Depending on what your users need to do and how you have designed your Salesforce system, platform licenses may be a great way to get more people on Salesforce without breaking the bank.

You just have to think about (and design around) the limitations. Since platform users can't access Opportunities (nor, by extension, any objects that are child to Opportunities, like the NPSP Payments object), you probably can't use platform licenses for anyone that works in fundraising and development. Since they can't access Campaigns, you will have to have platform users doing their job without using Campaign List Emails. But the many objects in the Program Management Module (PMM) come from a managed package, so they are all available to your platform users.

And if you've designed a program management setup in Salesforce that just relies on Contact, Account, and a handful of custom objects, you're good to go! For example, I've worked with clients that serve students around college acceptance. They track students (contacts), schools (accounts), programs (custom object), enrollments (custom object), college entrance tests (custom object), and college applications (custom object), as well as a few other things. It's no problem for program staff to use platform licenses.

Pricing

As you've probably guessed, platform licenses are quite a bit cheaper than full licenses.

Full Login:           List price $1,980/year (Nonprofit: $495/year)

Platform Starter:         List price $300/year (Nonprofit: $72/year)

Platform Plus:          List price $1,200/year (Nonprofit: $288/year)

That makes platform starter 85% off! 

The savings are less dramatic for nonprofits, who are already getting a steep discount off list prices. So if your nonprofit only has a few users above the P10 grant, it might not be worth the admin overhead (or, let's face it: technical debt) to support the second license type. But the cost/benefit catches up once you're paying for ten or more users that could be on platform—particularly if they could be on Starter.

The Crowdsourced Pricing Guide (User Logins tab) is probably the best place to look for the full pricing details, by the way.

Only Platform Users?

I should note that you can't have an org entirely on platform licenses, as far as I know. You have to have at least one full license as a system administrator. This wouldn't be a concern for a nonprofit that's going to get the Power of Us license grant, of course. But for everyone else (including nonprofits that are building a second Salesforce instance) it's way cheaper to have one or two full licenses for sysadmins and then all the rest be platform users.