FinOps: The missing piece in your Salesforce architecture

A changing landscape

Remember when Salesforce pricing was simple? You bought licenses, maybe some add-ons, and your costs stayed predictable month after month. Those days are fading into the rearview mirror.

Today, Salesforce is increasingly embracing consumption-based pricing alongside traditional subscriptions. This shift is most visible with their AI and Data Cloud offerings, which meter your usage and bill accordingly. It's like your electric bill: the more you use, the more you pay.

Technical decisions now have direct financial consequences in ways they never did before. That gorgeous automation you just built? It might be racking up API calls that translate directly to dollars. The AI agent your service team loves? Each interaction has a price tag.

This is why understanding FinOps, Financial Operations, is becoming a valuable core competency, whether you're an admin, developer, architect, or a business stakeholder.

FinOps 101: What you need to know

At its heart, FinOps is a cultural practice that brings together technology, finance, and business teams to take responsibility for the business value, including the associated spending, of the solutions they build in the cloud. It's built around three core activities or phases that form a continuous cycle:

• Inform: Creating visibility into what you're spending and why. This means tracking costs, allocating them to the right teams or projects, and making sure everyone can see what their actions cost.
• Optimize: Using data to identify opportunities for greater efficiency. This might involve eliminating waste, rightsizing resources, or rethinking processes to deliver the same value at lower cost.
• Operate: Embedding financial accountability into everyday work through processes, automation, and cultural norms. This is where FinOps moves from being a special project to becoming "just how we work."

Think of FinOps phases like nutrition tracking for your Salesforce org. First, you want to know what you're consuming (inform). Then you identify better choices (optimize). Finally, you change your habits for long-term health (operate).

These three phases were established by the FinOps Foundation, a nonprofit industry consortium that has developed a framework and best practices for cloud financial management.

The members of the foundation are a who's who of the key players of the IaaS and PaaS domains, as well as a few big-name SaaS vendors and practitioners. While Salesforce is not in that list, it does participate in the Linux Foundation, which serves as the umbrella organization for the FinOps Foundation.

The next step towards agility and autonomy

Modern development teams love autonomy. "You build it, you run it" has become a mantra for a reason: it empowers teams to move fast and innovate without waiting for approvals from central gatekeepers. It is a pillar of what constitutes agile practices and DevOps.

But in a consumption-based world, this autonomy creates a new challenge. When teams can spin up resources that directly generate costs, we need to extend the mantra to "You build it, you run it, you pay for it."

This doesn't mean we should abandon agility. Far from it. The challenge is bringing financial awareness into agile processes without creating bureaucracy that slows things down. That's the balance FinOps helps us strike.

It's like DevOps, but for business value

If you're familiar with DevOps, you know the concept of "shifting left": moving quality, security, and testing earlier in the development lifecycle instead of bolting them on at the end.

FinOps applies this same principle to financial decisions. Rather than finance discovering cost implications after money is spent, we bring cost awareness into the earliest stages of solution design.

This shift changes everything. Suddenly, architects, developers and admins are making informed tradeoffs between functionality and cost. Business stakeholders can prioritize based on ROI rather than just features. And finance becomes a partner in solution design rather than the department that says "no" after the fact.

Now more than ever

Salesforce's shift toward consumption pricing isn't happening in isolation — it's part of a broader industry trend. But it has particular significance in the Salesforce world for several reasons:

• Complex ecosystem: Most Salesforce orgs involve multiple clouds, AppExchange products, and custom solutions, making it harder to track where costs originate.
• Democratized development: With low-code tools, many more people can create solutions that consume resources. This multiplies potential spending sources.
• AI acceleration: Salesforce is betting big on AI, which inherently involves computation-heavy operations that align with consumption pricing.

At the time of publishing this, the highest-impact areas to watch include Agentforce, Data Cloud and, to a lesser extent, Heroku, as well as the associated integration and automation processes.

FinOps is a journey, not a destination. We don't need perfect processes to start seeing benefits. Even basic awareness and communication can significantly reduce waste and improve decision-making.

A competitive advantage

As Salesforce continues evolving toward consumption-based pricing, mastering FinOps principles can yield significant advantages:

• Fewer surprise bills and better budget forecasting
• More value from every dollar invested in the platform
• Faster innovation, with teams empowered to make cost-benefit tradeoffs without lengthy approval chains
• Better business cases, with clearer ROI calculations that account for all costs

The organizations that thrive won't be those who avoid consumption-based features — they're too valuable to ignore. Instead, the winners will be those who adopt these technologies with clear expectations of the business value they will be able to derive.

However, we need some assistance from those responsible of the platform in order to blaze this trail effectively. Has Salesforce started to move in this direction in the past couple of years? Without a shred of doubt. But there is still plenty of pending work if we want to be able to operate within the FinOps framework while building on the Salesforce ecosystem. There is only so much that the community can do on its own without relying on the leadership of all the involved product owners at Salesforce.

And how could we bridge that gap? Stay tuned for the next article.