For RIAs on Financial Services Cloud
You are paying $1,800 per seat, per year, for a data model.
Financial Services Cloud lists at $325 per user per month. Sales Cloud Enterprise lists at $175. FSC is built on top of Sales Cloud, so that $150 gap is not CRM capability. You already have all of that.
The gap is an industry data model. I build those. So do you, if you have an engineer.
The arithmetic
$150 per user, per month.
Every month, for as long as you run the firm.
Based on published list pricing. Your contract almost certainly has a discount on it. Discounts move these numbers and rarely close the gap, because the premium is proportional.
A typical exit for a 40-seat firm runs $35,000 to $60,000. Against $72,000 a year, that pays for itself inside the first twelve months and every year after that is margin you keep.
What you are actually buying
Three things.
All of them are builds.
A financial account object model
Financial Account, Financial Holding, and the related objects that hang off them. Custom objects with a Salesforce logo on the box.
A rollup engine
Aggregation of balances and activity up to the household. Real work, genuinely useful, and a solved problem in Apex.
A relationship tree component
The visual map of who belongs to which household and how. A Lightning Web Component. That is the whole thing.
I have built household-centric views with balance and activity rollups on stock Sales Cloud. I have built the relationship model across people, entities, and accounts. I have built a natural language assistant that answers questions about an org and its clients, and a scheduler that routes advisor calendars around real drive time.
None of that required an industry cloud. All of it belonged to the firm that paid for it once.
Where this goes wrong
The four objections,
answered straight.
“We would lose householding.”
You would not. Person Accounts and Account-Contact Relationships are standard Sales Cloud, not FSC features. The junction that holds households together is already in your org whether you license FSC or not. What FSC layers on top is the rollup behavior and the tree view, and I rebuild both as objects and code you own.
“Our integrations are built on FSC objects.”
Some are, some are not, and it varies by vendor even within the same category. This is the single most common reason an exit goes sideways in month four, which is exactly why the audit maps every integration touchpoint against FSC-specific objects before anyone commits to anything.
“Migrating sounds worse than the bill.”
Sometimes it is, and I will tell you when. It is real work: data model restructuring, Person Account handling, integration rebuilds, retraining. Firms with genuinely complex multi-entity and trust structures often should stay. The audit exists to find out which one you are before you spend anything on the migration.
“Our Salesforce rep will just discount us.”
Good. That is a win you can bank without moving a single record, and it is a completely legitimate outcome of this engagement. Walking into a renewal with a measured utilization report is leverage you do not currently have.
The part nobody tells you
License types can only change at renewal. If your Salesforce contract comes up in the next six to nine months, this is the window where the decision is actually available to you. Outside that window there is nothing to decide, because the answer is already locked for another term.
The engagement
The FSC audit.
$5,000, about two weeks.
I am not going to tell you nobody needs FSC. Some firms genuinely do, and if you are one of them I will say so and we are done. What I will tell you is that almost nobody measures it.
So the audit is a measurement, not an argument. You keep the full write-up either way, and the fee is credited against the migration if you decide to go.
What lands on your desk
- Your FSC utilization, measured. Which FSC-specific objects and fields are actually populated, and by how much.
- Every integration mapped against FSC-specific objects, so you know what would need rebuilding.
- The exit scope and cost, and the payback period against your real seat count.
- A go or no-go, in writing, including the case for staying if that is the honest answer.
Start here
What is your renewal date?
That is genuinely the first question. Tell me your renewal month, roughly how many Salesforce seats you have, and what you use FSC for day to day. I reply within one business day with a real read on whether an exit makes sense for you, including when it doesn't.