How Using Digital Wallet in Marketing Cloud Next Shapes Your Credit Usage, Consumption Patterns, and Campaign Costs
Understanding Salesforce’s Shift to Consumption Pricing – And What It Means for Marketing Cloud Next Users
When Salesforce began its move toward a credit-based consumption model, one question echoed across marketing, sales, and IT teams alike: How will we track, manage, and forecast credit usage? With the introduction of Marketing Cloud Next (MCN), Salesforce has taken a major step in unifying its marketing capabilities under a single, Data Cloud–powered ecosystem. This rebuild isn’t just cosmetic—the new personalization engine is designed to tap into richer agent activity and leverage it across the entire Salesforce suite, opening up new opportunities for holistic customer engagement.
However, with this expanded functionality comes the growing need for precise control over consumption. Teams must now be able to track real-time usage, anticipate future spend, and avoid unexpected overages. This is exactly where Salesforce’s Digital Wallet enters the conversation, now enhanced with additional marketer-friendly capabilities.
What Is a Salesforce Digital Wallet?
With the rise of Data Cloud, Salesforce accelerated its transition away from purely seat-based licensing toward a flexible, consumption-driven model. In this landscape, Digital Wallet becomes essential, offering businesses a consolidated, intuitive view into their credit usage.
The purpose is clear:
Provide transparency, simplify self-service, and help organizations take ownership of their credit consumption journey.
This evolution aligns perfectly with the broader shift happening inside Salesforce as Agentforce, automation, and AI become core to the platform. Customers adopting Agentforce are increasingly interacting with products where usage fluctuates. Digital Wallet helps ensure that this variability is not a blind spot.
Whether companies access Agentforce through Salesforce Foundations or the dedicated Agentforce SKU, usage tracking is now streamlined. Organizations finally have a reliable, real-time way to understand how AI conversations are consumed across different agents—reducing ambiguity and building confidence in their Salesforce investment.
The rise of Consumption-Based Salesforce Products
Salesforce has long been known for its seat-based licensing, but consumption pricing is far from new. Offerings such as ExactTarget, Heroku, and several analytics products have operated on usage-based billing for years.
The biggest advantage?
Flexibility.
Customers can purchase exactly what they need—no more, no less.
However, usage-based products also introduce new complexities around implementation, forecasting, and optimization. Many organizations have expressed concerns about transparency, limited insights, and the lack of actionable self-service tools to manage credits effectively. Salesforce has listened to this feedback, and Digital Wallet is their answer—creating a unified, customer-centric experience that helps teams budget and plan with confidence.
Tracking Usage Across Multiple Contracts
Digital Wallet supports a wide variety of Salesforce consumption products, including:
- Agentforce for Sales
- Agentforce for Service
- Data Cloud
- Einstein Requests
- Einstein Personalization
- Salesforce Messaging
- …and more are being added continuously
Within the Consumption Cards tab, customers can instantly view consumed credits, remaining limits, and usage patterns across one or more contracts. Better yet, Digital Wallet intelligently pools entitlements—even when purchased under separate agreements—and deducts credits from the contract expiring soonest. This near–real time update cycle helps businesses avoid surprises and maintain continuity in their operations.
Digital Wallet for Marketing Cloud Next
For Marketing Cloud Next customers, the move to consumption pricing affects several key areas:
- Messaging: Email, SMS, and WhatsApp sends
- Audience segmentation and activations through Data Cloud
- Data storage usage
- Einstein AI requests
- Campaign Calendar forecasting
One of the standout enhancements is the ability to predict consumption based on your campaign calendar. Users can visually map campaign start and end dates, hover over campaign details, and drill into deeper insights such as segment size—all of which influence credit usage. This allows marketing teams to forecast consumption before launch, optimize their planning cycles, and avoid unexpected credit drain.
A Closer Look: Consumption Cards and Agent Integrations
Inside the MCN application, every source of consumption is displayed as a dedicated card, each linked to the corresponding Salesforce contract. Clicking into a card reveals detailed trend analysis and usage breakdowns over time.
This becomes even more powerful when paired with Agentforce.
From the card view, users can open the Agentforce sidebar and interact with conversational AI in natural language. Whether it’s generating a campaign brief, planning a re-engagement journey, or analyzing performance, Agentforce provides contextual support—turning Digital Wallet into more than just a dashboard, but an intelligent decision making companion.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce deserves recognition for building a Digital Wallet experience that finally gives customers clarity around their consumption. For organizations moving to Marketing Cloud Next, this transparency is invaluable for operational budgeting, campaign planning, and long-term forecasting.
However, one question remains—particularly for teams with cross-functional credit usage:
What happens if credits intended for marketing are consumed by another team, like sales or service?
If budgets are fixed and extra credits aren’t an option, how will Salesforce ensure that mission-critical marketing campaigns aren’t jeopardized?
Perhaps Salesforce is working on role-based allocation or product-specific credit fences. Or maybe Marketing Cloud Next credits can only be used within the MCN ecosystem. Until Salesforce provides a definitive answer, these questions will continue to surface for enterprises with shared consumption pools.
At BrinkView LLP, we continue to monitor these developments closely. As Salesforce deepens its commitment to AI, data, and consumption-based architecture, our goal is to help clients navigate this new landscape confidently—optimizing spend, reducing waste, and unlocking maximum value from Marketing Cloud Next.