Salesforce to acquire usage-based billing specialist m3ter

Salesforce is planning to acquire m3ter, a provider of usage-based billing, to expand the capabilities of Revenue Cloud, now known as Agentforce Revenue Management.

“The acquisition will bring high-volume mediation, metering and rating capabilities natively to Agentforce Revenue Management, enabling enterprises to launch, track, scale, and bill with the flexible usage and outcome-based pricing models needed for the AI era,” the company said in a statement.

“Most enterprises selling software or services are still on legacy CPQ and billing systems built for seat-based pricing. Their own products are increasingly AI-driven and usage-heavy, and their billing infrastructure simply hasn’t kept up. They’re either building custom metering layers, stitching together Stripe with homegrown tools, or leaving money on the table because they can’t accurately track consumption,” said Bhupendra Chopra, chief revenue officer at IT consulting firm Kanerika.

“m3ter inside Agentforce Revenue Management means those companies can run usage-based and outcome-based billing natively inside Salesforce, without cobbling together external systems. Faster billing cycles, fewer reconciliation errors, and the ability to launch new pricing models without rebuilding their monetization stack from scratch. That’s a real operational win for a CIO,” Chopra added.

Aiding the monetization layer for Headless 360

While Salesforce talks up how the acquisition will enable it to better serve its customers, it could also enable it to better bill them, as it attempts to grow its own revenue by monetizing interactions with its AI services.

Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting, said, “m3ter’s metering and rating capabilities are likely to become a core component of Salesforce’s broader Headless 360 and agentic CRM strategy, enabling monetization of APIs, AI agents, workflows, and machine-to-machine interactions.” Jain said.

“Salesforce’s Headless 360 enables AI agents, applications, and APIs to consume CRM capabilities directly, making traditional per-seat licensing less relevant. By adding m3ter’s metering and rating capabilities, Salesforce gains the ability to measure, price, and bill for that consumption, making the acquisition key to generating revenue from the new offering,” he added.

He sees m3ter’s capabilities helping Salesforce address some of the more critical concerns that CIOs have around implementing agentic systems at scale: what constitutes a billable event, how AI agent interactions will be charged, what usage visibility tools are available, whether spending caps and anomaly detection exist, and how future costs can be forecast.

“The acquisition creates the foundation for CRM FinOps capabilities such as consumption dashboards, quotas, spending alerts, chargeback mechanisms, cost forecasting, and agent ROI tracking,” Jain said.

Salesforce expects to close the deal by the end of July.