Something quietly significant has happened to the economics of building on Salesforce, and most teams have not yet redrawn their plans to match it. Earlier this year Salesforce renamed Data Cloud to Data 360 and made ingestion of your core Salesforce data free, then used the Summer ’26 release in June to push real-time data activation and multi-agent orchestration on top of it. The meter that used to run every time you pulled Sales Cloud or Service Cloud records into a unified profile has been switched off. That is genuinely good news, and it is worth understanding why before moving to the more interesting question of what a unified data foundation is actually for.
The reflex in a lot of organisations will be to treat free ingestion as a reason to pour everything in and worry about the rest later. There is a better opportunity here, and it is not the one on the pricing page. When the cost of moving data disappears, the value shifts entirely to what you do with it once it lands. That is where the upside lives, and it is a much more optimistic story than the old one about credit budgets and ingestion caps.
What did Salesforce actually change with Data 360?
Salesforce Data 360 is the renamed and repriced version of what used to be Data Cloud, the platform layer that unifies customer records from across Salesforce and external sources into a single profile. The headline change, effective February 2026, is that ingesting structured data from the core Salesforce connectors (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud Engagement, Marketing Cloud Personalisation and Commerce Cloud) no longer consumes credits. Four separate credit types were merged into one flexible Data Service Credit, sandbox usage now carries a 20 per cent discount, and the Digital Wallet gives feature-level visibility into consumption with threshold alerts. The June Summer ’26 release added real-time data activation and multi-agent orchestration on top of that foundation.
Read together, those changes point in one direction. Salesforce wants the data foundation to be the default place your customer records live, because everything the company is building next, from Agentforce to real-time personalisation, is only as good as the profile it can reach. Making ingestion free removes the most common excuse for keeping data scattered across objects, orgs and spreadsheets. The economics now reward consolidation, and for once that incentive is pointed at something worth doing.
Why free ingestion is a genuine opportunity
Start with the good news, because there is a real amount of it. For years the honest blocker to a unified customer view was not ambition but arithmetic. Every connector, every historical backfill and every sandbox rebuild carried a running cost, so teams rationed what they brought in and quietly accepted a partial picture. Removing that cost changes the default. You can now bring your full Sales and Service history into one profile without a business case built around credit consumption, which means the conversation moves from “can we afford to unify this” to “what becomes possible once it is unified”.
The practical wins arrive quickly. Proofs of concept that used to stall on ingestion budgets can now run in a discounted sandbox. Marketing, sales and service can look at the same customer record rather than three partial versions. Budget that used to be spent simply getting data into the platform can be redirected to activation, the part that actually drives revenue. This is a lower barrier to a foundation that many teams have wanted for a long time, and it deserves to be treated as the opportunity it is rather than a line item to optimise.
What is CRM data quality, and why does it decide everything?
CRM data quality is the degree to which the records in your system are accurate, complete, consistent, timely and free of duplication. It decides everything downstream because every report, forecast, automation and AI agent inherits the state of the data beneath it. A unified profile built on duplicated accounts, stale contact details or inconsistent field definitions does not become trustworthy simply because it now lives in one place. High quality data is what turns a customer profile into a decision you can act on, and it is the single biggest determinant of whether an AI grounded in that data gives useful answers or confident nonsense.
This is the part of the story the free ingestion headline can obscure. Bringing more data into Data 360 does not raise its quality, and in the short term it can lower the average, because you are now pooling the good records with every duplicate and half-filled field that was previously hidden away in a corner of Service Cloud. The unified profile is honest in a way the silos never were. It shows you exactly how consistent your data really is, which is uncomfortable at first and enormously useful once you act on it.
Ingesting data is not the same as harmonising it
The word “ingestion” does a lot of quiet work in the pricing announcement. Ingestion means the data has arrived. It says nothing about whether the account in Sales Cloud, the case contact in Service Cloud and the subscriber in Marketing Cloud have been resolved to the same person, or whether “customer status” means the same thing across all three. That resolution is called harmonisation, and it is the real work that Data 360 asks of you. Now that the meter on arrival is off, harmonisation is where the effort and the value both concentrate.
Harmonisation covers mapping source fields to a common data model, defining the rules that match records to a single identity, and deciding which source wins when two systems disagree. None of that is free in the sense that matters, which is human judgement and time. The encouraging part is that this work compounds. A well modelled foundation makes every future use case cheaper, because the next team to build on Data 360 inherits clean identity resolution rather than rebuilding it. Free ingestion lowers the entry cost, and disciplined harmonisation is what converts that head start into a durable advantage.
How does data debt quietly inflate your Agentforce results?
CRM technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts in how a CRM was built and maintained: redundant fields, undocumented automations, inconsistent data models and integrations held together by workarounds. Data debt is its most expensive form, because grounding an AI agent in a messy foundation does not expose the mess politely. Where a broken report shows an obvious gap, an agent answers fluently and confidently from whatever the profile contains, so a wrong answer looks exactly like a right one. The Summer ’26 push toward multi-agent orchestration raises the stakes, because several agents now share and act on that same foundation.
The optimistic reading is that Data 360 gives you one place to fix this rather than many. When customer data is unified, data quality stops being a per-system firefight and becomes a foundation-level programme you can actually resource and measure. Cleaning identity resolution once improves every agent, report and automation that reads from the profile. That leverage did not exist when the same customer was scattered across five systems, and it is a far more hopeful position than the fragmented one most teams are leaving behind.
Where should teams start now that the meter is off?
The first move is not to ingest everything at once. It is to pick the customer decisions you most want to improve, whether that is a cleaner service handover, a sharper renewal signal or a genuinely unified marketing view, and work backwards to the data those decisions need. Free ingestion makes it tempting to boil the ocean, but a focused foundation built around real use cases will be trustworthy far sooner than a complete one built around none. Bring in the sources those decisions depend on, model them properly, and prove the value before widening the scope.
From there the work is steady and rewarding rather than heroic. Agree a common data model and the definitions behind it. Set identity resolution rules and test them against real edge cases. Put light governance around who can add sources and how quality is monitored, using the Digital Wallet visibility to keep an eye on where activation is actually consuming credits. Each of these steps is achievable, and each one makes the next use case faster to deliver. Teams that treat the free ingestion moment as a prompt to build well, rather than to build fast, will find themselves with a foundation that keeps paying back long after the pricing change stops being news.
The Sirocco perspective
We think the Data 360 pricing change is one of the more genuinely useful shifts Salesforce has made this year, precisely because it removes an excuse that was holding good teams back. In our work across Salesforce, HubSpot and Dynamics 365, the organisations that get the most from a unified data foundation are the ones that treat free ingestion as the starting line rather than the finish. They invest the effort they save on data movement into modelling, identity resolution and governance, and they choose a first use case narrow enough to prove trust quickly. As an independent partner we are not paid to help you consume more credits. We are paid to help you build a foundation your reports, your people and your agents can rely on. Free ingestion lowers the barrier, and the work of turning that data into something ready is where the real return is waiting. If you would like a clear-eyed view of where your Salesforce data stands today and what a Data 360 foundation could realistically deliver, we would be glad to help you map it. You can schedule a consultation with our team whenever the timing suits.
Get in Touch
If you are weighing what a unified Data 360 foundation could do for your Salesforce estate, and where the modelling and governance work should start, we are happy to talk it through.
