The Bill Went Up, The Seats Went Down
SaaStr's Salesforce bill increased 80% year-over-year despite reducing seat count. Jason Lemkin, founder of the B2B SaaS media platform, shared the numbers on The Agents podcast. No new users. No major feature upgrades. Just the bill.
This tracks with Salesforce's 9% average price increase in 2023 and the new Agentforce pricing model at $125 per user per month. For sales teams justifying CRM costs to CFOs, this is the conversation: same tool, higher cost, unclear ROI improvement.
AI Agent Ships Campaigns, Marketo Breaks Compliance
SaaStr's AI marketing agent, called 10K, now generates campaign ideas, pulls segments from Salesforce, drafts copy, and queues sends. Autonomously. On Saturdays.
Meanwhile, Marketo failed to honour unsubscribes for 10 days. People who opted out kept receiving emails. People fully deleted from the database kept receiving emails. CAN-SPAM violation at scale.
SaaStr escalated. Day 7: Marketo support joined a call and asked them to explain the issue again. Day 10: still broken.
The team built a custom unsubscribe page in Replit in 20 minutes. Bypassed Marketo's broken form flow. Called the API directly. Fixed.
The Trade Is Over
A year ago, if your vendor's compliance tooling broke, you waited. Or hired a consultant. Or started a six-month migration.
Now, non-engineers vibe-code fixes faster than enterprise support responds. Lemkin's co-host Amelia is not a developer. She shipped the Marketo workaround in 20 minutes using a 2014-era API that Replit flagged as outdated.
For sales ops teams paying six figures for marketing automation and CRM, this is the new math: legacy vendor bills up, support quality flat, and your team can now build the fix themselves before the ticket gets assigned.
What This Means for ANZ Sales Teams
If you are running Salesforce and Marketo, check your renewal terms. Salesforce pricing increases are hitting globally, not just US accounts. If your bill is climbing and your seat count is not, calculate cost per user and compare against HubSpot, Pipedrive, or other CRM alternatives.
For marketing ops, the Marketo story is a compliance risk. If unsubscribes are not processing, you are exposed. Test your flows. If they are broken, you can fix it faster than support will.
SaaStr also quietly churned off Notion months ago without telling anyone, including Notion. They stopped logging in. No one noticed. If your sales team has tools in the stack that no one uses, now is the time to audit and cut.
Revenue at SaaStr went from negative 19% to positive 47% year-over-year with three humans and 20-plus AI agents. Fewer seats. Lower software spend in some areas. Higher in others. The legacy SaaS stack is showing cracks, and the teams running AI in production are the ones feeling it first.