Salesforce fine-tunes 'per drink' pricing for developers

Salesforce.com on Thursday introduced a cheaper way to access applications written with its Force.com platform and detailed an Eclipse-based development tool.

Right now, the fee to use applications written for Force--Salesforce's hosted development platform--is $50 per user per month for an unlimited amount of time.

Saleforce.com's Force integrated development environment for building hosted Web applications.

(Credit: Saleforce.com)

The company added another option, in which applications cost $5 per log-in with a maximum of five log-ins per month. This option is meant for applications that are accessed only occasionally, like vacation request programs, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at the company.

Salesforce also announced enhancements to its Eclipse-based development tool that are designed to make it easier to write the user interface portion of a Web application.

Programmers can also save their Force code into source code management systems. It also added Force "Sandbox," a service for testing applications during development.

The new components to the development platform are designed to give programmers more sophisticated tools for on-demand applications, Gross said.