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Three ways off Open CTI, and what each one costs

Stay with your vendor, move to Amazon Connect, or take Salesforce's native Contact Center. The list prices, who each path suits, and what a 100-seat team pays in Salesforce licences before the vendor's own charges.

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When Salesforce retires Open CTI on 28 February 2028, every org with a softphone in the utility bar has to be somewhere else. There are three places to go. Each has a different licence, a different vendor conversation and a different bill, and the bill is the part most teams find out about last.

Prices below are list prices from salesforce.com, verified on 16 September 2026. Your contract will differ; the point is the shape, and the fact that the number exists at all.

Path one: stay with your vendor

Keep the telephony provider you have and move the Salesforce side to Voice with Partner Telephony. The vendor’s Open CTI adapter is replaced by its Voice connector, and calls route through Omni-Channel instead of through the vendor’s own rules.

Salesforce names Amazon Connect, Five9, Genesys, NiCE and Vonage as vendors with out-of-the-box Voice integration. Aircall documents a route of its own. For RingCentral, 8x8, Talkdesk and Dialpad, ask the vendor directly; the answer is usually yes, but the timing and the connector’s maturity vary.

Salesforce licence: Partner Contact Center, at USD 50, EUR 50 or GBP 40 per user per month. Transcription needs the partner licence on top. Your telephony contract carries on separately, so this is a new line in the Salesforce budget, not a replacement for one.

This is the path most existing Open CTI orgs take, because the phone system, the numbers, the IVR and the vendor relationship all stay put. The work is on the Salesforce side.

Path two: Amazon Connect

Move the telephony itself to Amazon Connect, bought through Salesforce and priced by minute tier on an annual contract. Salesforce documents this as its own path, and for orgs whose telephony contract is up for renewal anyway, or whose vendor has no clear Voice route, it is worth pricing.

The trade is that you are changing the phone system as well as the Salesforce integration: numbers port, the IVR is rebuilt, and the vendor relationship changes. That is a larger project than path one, and it belongs on a longer timeline.

Path three: Native Contact Center

Salesforce supplies the telephony itself. USD 125 per user per month at list, and US-only for now: as of September 2026 there is no EUR or GBP pricing. For a US team that wants one vendor and one bill, it is the simplest end state. For anyone in the UK or the EU, it is not currently an option.

What a 100-seat team actually pays

Take path one, the common case, for a 100-seat UK contact centre. At list, Partner Contact Center is GBP 40 per user per month: roughly GBP 48,000 a year in Salesforce licences before the vendor’s own charges, and before transcription. For a US team it is USD 60,000. A 30-seat team is a third of that. None of it is dramatic on its own, but none of it is in the current budget either, because Open CTI never carried a per-seat Salesforce licence of its own.

That is the number to put in front of finance in the 2027 budget round, not in the 2028 renewal conversation.

The costs that are not on the price list

The licence is the visible cost. The migration has three more that rarely make it into the first estimate. Anything built on the Open CTI API has to be rebuilt as a Voice Extension or with the Voice Toolkit. Every flow, report and dashboard on the Task call fields has to be re-pointed to VoiceCall, or it quietly stops working. And if Omni-Channel has never been enabled, that is a project before the migration can begin. Each of those is a line of effort, and the size of each one depends entirely on what is in your org.

Sources, including Salesforce’s own migration path guide, are on our references page.

Get the budget brief

If you own the budget rather than the org, we have put the seat maths, the licence cost at list, the work items and a timeline into a four-page brief you can put against a 2027 budget round. It does not need anyone to authorise anything: leave a work email on the Open CTI page and it is yours.

If you do have an admin to hand, the free, read-only Open CTI Retirement Scan puts your own seat count against the licence price and names the rebuild and re-pointing work, in about five minutes.

Related work

More from CX Labs on this topic

Blog What Salesforce Voice with Partner Telephony actually changes Salesforce Voice replaces Open CTI, and five of its rules are non-negotiable: Lightning only, no mobile app, calls on VoiceCall, Omni-Channel first, separate billing. Each one shapes the migration.

Blog Your call reports will stop working, and nobody will notice Open CTI writes calls to Task. Salesforce Voice writes them to VoiceCall. Nothing breaks on cut-over day; the old reports just stop showing new calls until someone notices the numbers have gone flat.

Blog Omni-Channel is the prerequisite that decides your timeline Salesforce Voice cannot be set up until Omni-Channel is on, because Omni-Channel becomes the routing engine for calls. Whether you already run it is the biggest single factor in how long the migration takes.

Blog When to start your Open CTI migration Seventeen months sounds like a long time. It is not, once you add up routing design, a new call centre, rebuilt softphone code and every report on the old call fields. The bands we use to decide when to start.

Blog Vonage and the Open CTI retirement: what changes for your org If your agents take calls through Vonage inside Salesforce, the adapter doing it is probably Open CTI. What the retirement means for Vonage customers, what Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice changes, and how to sequence it.

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