Stack Platform Licenses

One of the best ways to save on the cost of your Salesforce licenses is to have users on Platform Starter licenses. At $25/user/month list price (and just $6/user/month for nonprofits) they're a pretty inexpensive way to get your colleagues into the system. (Remind yourself about login pricing at the Crowdsourced Salesforce.org Pricing Guide.) There are limitations on logins though platform licenses, so you have to think carefully about what those users are going to do in the system and potentially make architecture choices to account for having users log in that way.

But I bet you didn't know that you could stack platform licenses. That's a neat trick I learned about relatively recently. With some careful planning, design, and documentation this could be a way to save your org money year after year.

Platform License Limitations

Let's start with what platform licenses are: they're a cheap way to get onto the Salesforce CRM platform, but not the standard applications (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud). Most people barely distinguish "the platform" from "Sales Cloud" in the first place. [And in the nonprofit context, where we get access to most of the Service Cloud features at the same time in our P10 grants, I think we don't really consider either Sales Cloud or Service Cloud to be distinct from just "the plaform."] But Sales Cloud is a specific app built for tracking sales deals, which is to say, Opportunities, Products, Leads, and Campaigns. (Marketing and the Campaign and Lead functionality were originally part of Sales Cloud, even if now marketing has an entire life—and cloud—of its own.) But they can access Accounts, Contacts, Reports, and Dashboards, even Cases. (Look here for the full breakdown.)

The limit we most often focus on for platform licensing (and the point of today's post) is that Starter licenses can only access ten custom objects. They access unlimited custom objects that are installed by managed packages. But if you're creating your own customizations, you'll be limited to ten of your custom objects.

Platform Plus licenses can access up to 110 custom objects, which seems like it's pretty effectively "as many as you want." But Platform Plus licenses cost four times what a Platform Starter costs, so the jump from ten to 110 objects might not seem worth paying for. More on that in a moment.

Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

NPSP is a managed package, so you can use a lot of NPSP functionality on a platform license. Relationships, the Household Account Model, and Affiliations to multiple accounts are all available using platform licensing—and those are some of my favorite features. But to the extent that NPSP is focused on nonprofit fundraising, without access to the Opportunity object your platform users couldn't do that.

They could still see the NPSP rollups that summarize giving, since those show on the contact and on the account. So you have the option of putting fundraising users on full licenses and program management users on platform licenses. I've done that with some of my clients.

Need More Custom Objects?

But what if your program management implementation—or any other use case, including not-nonprofit ones—is architected to need more than ten custom objects? That's what I really wanted to talk about. You can "stack" platform licenses. (I can't actually point to a specific policy document to prove this, or I'd give you a link.) But I am told by more than one source that this is an officially-allowed way to work with platform licenses. If you need to give a platform user access to, say, 15 custom objects, you just have to assign them two platform starter licenses. That's still quite a bit cheaper than paying for a full license, or even a Platform Plus. Here are list prices compared:

Platform Starter = $300/year x2 = $600 [Nonprofit: $144]

Platform Plus = $1,200/year [Nonprofit: $288]

Full License ("Sales Cloud" or "Lightning Enterprise Edition") = $1,980/year    [Nonprofit: $495]

So until you need your platform users to get 40 custom objects, you still save money by stacking compared to upgrading to Platform Plus. (And I guess if you're hitting 40 custom objects, 110 is not too far behind, so you'll eventually need Platform Plus? That's a lot of objects!)

How to Stack

But... There isn't a way to actually assign two user licenses to a single person.

To stack, what you're going to actually do is assign one and leave a second unassigned for each user in this situation. That's going to look a little confusing in Company Information.

Every time you open that screen it's going to look like you've got a bunch of extra licenses you shouldn't be paying for.

I have suggestions on this front:

1. Make it clear with your account executive that you are intending to use license stacking. You may need some back-and-forth on this, as some AEs also probably have never heard of this. Do your best to get the final acknowledgement/approval in an email. Save that email for future reference.

2. Document that your organization uses license stacking so that future admins will know this is how things work. (That documentation should include that email from #1.)

3. Carefully document who "has" two licenses, particularly in case Salesforce should ever decide to audit your account. (Might I suggest an object for tracking this...?)

Be Honest

One final note: Given that this is both out-of-the-ordinary and pretty rare, I don't think Salesforce is looking for it. I suspect that you're basically on the Honor System to assign one and set one aside. Be honest about it. By allowing this, Salesforce is being reasonable, even flexible. So don't ruin things for everyone by trying to pull a fast one. Really set one aside. Really document that you know that you have extra licenses but that you can't/won't assign them because they're "in use."