Free Salesforce swag is always something that Trailblazers, Salesforce clients, and Salesforce-addict consultants are looking for… but when it comes to free licences, that’s a whole other issue !

In last TDX 2023 (TrailblazerDX 2023) on March 7th and 8th, Salesforce announced the addition of 5 FREE Integration user (= API Only) users for their clients (with Salesforce Enterprise and Unlimited editions), to be deployed, in a phased way as of March 14th, with additional licences at a very challenging price.

And, here they come !!

Salesforce, with its last Spring’23 patch 13.1, introduced the Salesforce Integration user license along with a Profile named API Only.

As indicated by its name, this new profile is dedicated to back-office operations / integrations.

Naturally, in past and ongoing Salesforce implementations, Salesforce Architects and Technical Lead still recommend to use dedicated user (with either System Admin or Custom technical-oriented profile) to handle integration use case within Salesforce (still with proper connected app configuration as a best practice).

Each integration type is often covered by a dedicated user (or at least it should be).

That often leads to contexts with up to 3 or 5 dedicated integration users for integrations. Even if is aligned, this way, with administration & security standards, all these users consumes « all included » highly-priced « business » licenses slots.

From an admin point of view, there is no need anymore to create / clone new custom profile (who has cloned it from System Admin profile with out modifying it ? Moreover, who has always handled them directly as Admin ? ). The new API Only profile is here on the shelf.

As it is an « API Only » enabled profile, the users who will be assigned this new profile, will only be dedicated to integration use cases, because users would not be able – as it should always be the case for technical / integration users in order to avoid security-related access issue – to login to Salesforce login page by using the user credentials (that generally never expire, by the way).

The existing and new users – dedicated to integration use case – are now to be transferred / created with this new license and profile. Have fun & free some licenses !

Just be cautious about :

• Automatisms / Apex code / bypass triggers… that may leverage profiles names. They should be taken in account concomitantly with the profile assignment switch to the new license/profile.
• Check your integration after your license switch (with non-regression testing) on sandbox before impacting the configuration. Obvious comment, but that does not hurt to write it 😉

For information, to be complete, an known issue has been logged by Salesforce, because some clients, who had already created a custom « API Only » profile with the same security idea, have encountered issues in their code. The issue is currently handled by Salesforce and will be solved in an upcoming patch.

In addition :

• A Integration licence will be available in Developer Editions to test the feature
• For customers who would need additional licenses, it will be possible to buy additional licenses at a very challenging $10 per user per month price (current public licences price shared by Salesforce).

To read more about Integration users :

• Salesforce Ben’s Top 5 Announcements at TrailblazerDX ‘23
• Value of Having a Dedicated Integration User (old article with still valuable insights)
• Salesforce Help : Assign the New Salesforce Integration User License to Grant API Only Access
• Known issue : If you already have a custom API Only profile with same name
• Salesforce+ TDX2023 content