Answer
How do I reduce Salesforce costs?
Short answer
Convert inactive full users to Platform or Chatter Free licenses, deprovision at offboarding within 24 hours, and audit permission sets before renewal.
Details
Salesforce Enterprise Edition is $165/user/month. Every ghost seat is $2,000/year of pure waste — and the true-up structure means you can't downgrade mid-term.
The two highest-ROI plays: (1) tag every user with a last-login timestamp and revoke anyone inactive 60+ days, (2) move read-only stakeholders (finance, exec) to a $25/mo Platform license instead of full Sales Cloud.
Automate this with SeatMap.AI
The audit path above works. It also takes hours per month per tool. SeatMap.AI runs it on a schedule, stages the reclaim actions for review, and shows you the annualized savings in real dollars.