Is Flex cheaper than Data Services?

Hello.

New Data 360 contracts can come with Flex Credits, a consolidated credit model that also includes Agentforce and Slack consumption. Some parts of the pipeline (specifically the ingestion and transform parts) got cheaper, others got more expensive (segmentation, real-time), and which side your org lands on depends on what it does with the data.

But I also have many clients who are still on Data Services Credits, with an option to convert them to Flex. The conversion swaps the whole Data Services pool, not just a part of it, so they ask a simple question:

“SHOULD WE SWITCH OR STAY?”

And we usually talk about 5-year contracts, sometimes big ones, where the calculations were made using the old consumption model. So we have to be careful.

Where Flex is cheaper

The most important part is that external Batch Ingestion is 100% free in Flex Credits billing. This means that if you have an org with data coming from third-party (especially without Zero-Copy), you can cut the whole cost from batch ingestion, no matter the frequency.

Unification drops from 100,000 to 75,000 credits per 1M rows, so the 1.4M source profiles from my credits guide cost 105,000 credits instead of 140,000.

Batch transforms go from 400 to 40. 10x less than now. And it also counts for Data Graphs, which is a huge difference for Marketing Cloud Next users, compared to Data Services.

Let’s say you have a Data Graph that uses DMOs that have a sum of 8 million records. With 1 run per day, it costs 3200 credits daily, 1,168,000 credits per year, 5,840,000 credits per 5-year contract. You start with 20M credits (starter license plus some additional credits for use cases) and this single process eats over 25% of your budget, just to deliver the personalization with 1-day latency.

Switching to Flex Credits reduces this cost to 116,800 credits per year, 584,000 credits per whole contract, it’s below 3% of your budget.

With Flex Credits, you can add the Segment Membership DMO to it and use it cheaply, or just boost the frequency of updates. Data Graphs also have a new streaming refresh option, which should process only the changed records instead of the whole set on every run. That means faster personalization, and potentially a cheaper one, but only if a small part of your records changes. The streaming multiplier is much higher (3,500 vs 40 credits per 1M rows on Flex), so against a daily batch refresh it wins only when less than about 1.14% of the records change per day. If you refreshed the batch graph every hour instead, that line would move to roughly 27%. It’s a new feature and I’m assuming it bills like a streaming transform and counts only the records that changed, so treat these numbers as my assumption until I confirm it in the Digital Wallet.

Where Flex costs more

Segmentation goes from 20 to 50 credits per 1M rows. It means 2.5x more expensive audience building for Marketing Cloud Next and Marketing Cloud Engagement use cases.

Also, Data Queries go up from 2 to 3 credits. Small difference in numbers, but this 50% increase can be pretty costly, if you are a heavy user of dashboards, related lists, activity tabs and all other stuff that consumes Data Queries.

The biggest change is in the Real-Time Pipeline, as it goes from 70,000 to 250,000, which at list price ($500 per 100,000 credits) is $350 vs $1,250 per 1M events. I couldn’t find any suitable use case to try this pipeline in my implementations (because it was expensive), so right now I will probably avoid it even more. :P

Calculated Insights are added to the same billable usage type as Batch Data Transforms. In Data Services, they had a 15 per 1M records multiplier, but now they fall into 40 per 1M records billing. 2.7x more expensive, but this shouldn’t be a big issue, unless you use a lot of them and with frequent intervals.

What I would tell a client

I will always start with “It depends”, of course. But TLDR 👇

Flex Credits definitely win when it comes to reducing the ingestion and transform phases. If you ingest a lot of data from different sources and/or transform it, you should quickly calculate the differences.

If your data comes only from your CRM and other Salesforce clouds, you build A TON OF SEGMENTS and activations, and you need neither big, fast Data Graphs nor a shared pool with your Agentforce activities, you can stay.

And if you do a ton of ingestion, data transforms, calculated insights, segments and many other things, with a low number of Unified Profiles, you can also consider Profile-Based billing. But this is another big topic and it will be heavily dependent on what terms you agree with Salesforce.

New on the blog

• I’ve created the Credit calculator (currently in beta). It shows the formula behind every number and compares Flex Credits to Profile-Based billing. It doesn’t price Data Services, so for that side use the tables in the credits guide.
• Data 360 Credits Guide, updated with Flex Credits and profile-based billing
• Consent Management in Marketing Cloud Next, the introduction to the series that started with The consent sync dilemma. The part on custom fields for Leads and Contacts is still in progress.
• Bulk image import for MC Next – speeds up the process of uploading tens or hundreds of images to Marketing Cloud Next
• Config Snapshot for Data 360 – an extension that exports the configuration of your Data 360 org: data model, data streams, mappings, segments, activations and more. It’s now available in the Chrome Web Store.

If a result in the calculator doesn’t match your org, hit reply and tell me which number you expected.

See ya!

Szymon.