What the End-of-Life of Salesforce CPQ Means for Your Business
If you’ve been on the Salesforce CPQ journey since the SteelBrick days, this moment has been a long time coming.
SteelBrick was once the agile, lightweight CPQ solution that promised fast deployment, ease of use, and native integration with Salesforce. It was built for speed and simplicity; a welcome alternative to bloated legacy quoting tools. When Salesforce acquired SteelBrick in 2015, it felt like a smart, strategic match: big platform meets nimble functionality.
What began as a focused product was gradually absorbed into the Salesforce ecosystem; rebranded, rearchitected, bundled into larger offerings, and ultimately diluted. Today, many businesses are left using a CPQ solution that barely resembles the one they originally bought into.
It’s aging, no longer actively improved, increasingly expensive to maintain, and comes with more friction every time Salesforce changes something upstream. Support is harder to come by, upgrades are riskier, and the roadmap is dictated by Salesforce’s push toward bundled enterprise products like Revenue Cloud and Data Cloud — not your needs.
This blog is here to unpack what really happened and what you can do about it. We’ll walk through:
The timeline of SteelBrick’s rise and transformation inside Salesforce.
The growing challenges businesses are facing as the platform winds down
Why some “upgrade” paths may actually introduce more risk and complexity
How you can take back control with a modern, flexible alternative to Salesforce CPQ
If you’re looking for a way to regain ownership of your sales stack — without getting locked into another black box — now’s the time to start planning.
From SteelBrick to Salesforce CPQ
— And the Slow Fade-Out
But over time, that DNA started to disappear.
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Here’s how the shift unfolded:
2015
Salesforce acquires SteelBrick for $360M. Platform known for speed, simplicity, and native Salesforce integration.
2016-2018
Rebranded as Salesforce CPQ. Early integrations with Billing begin. Customers see first signs of added complexity.
2019
Salesforce introduces Revenue Cloud concept. CPQ now bundled with Billing and Subscription Management.
2020-2022
Innovation on CPQ slows. Support shifts toward newer bundled solutions. Platform performance issues emerge.
2023-2024
The Switch-Off is Happening — and It’s Already Creating Problems
Salesforce may not have issued a formal end-of-life notice for CPQ — but for many businesses, the lights are already dimming. Over the past 12–18 months, signs of a quiet switch-off have become impossible to ignore.
And while the messaging from Salesforce remains vague (“upgrades,” “Revenue Cloud migration,” “evolving roadmap”), the reality for users is clear: the SteelBrick platform is being left behind, and the impacts are already being felt.
Support deflection and documentation dead zones
As more resources shift to Revenue Cloud and Subscription Management, legacy users are feeling the squeeze:
Longer ticket turnaround times
Migration pressure with no clear path
Customers are increasingly being nudged toward Revenue Cloud or a complete CPQ reimplementation — but it’s rarely a lift-and-shift. These migrations often come with enterprise-grade price tags, ballooning timelines, and frustrating trade-offs.
Projects can easily exceed $250,000, stretch over 6 to 12 months, and leave teams with reduced functionality compared to what they had in their original, streamlined deployments. You’re not just upgrading — you’re paying more to rebuild a quoting system that may not even serve your current needs as well as the original did.
In short, many teams are being asked to solve problems Salesforce created, and to do it on Salesforce’s terms. The bottom line is: you’re being nudged out.
Feature stagnation and broken promises
If you’re still running a SteelBrick-style CPQ deployment, you’ve likely encountered:
Incompatibility with newer features like Salesforce Genie (Data Cloud)
Overall performance degradation on large or complex quotes
Reveal areas that need proactive, defensive or collaborative resource
One of our experts will review your current data risk, examine current governance and security controls, map data flow and empower you to create a culture of cyber security within your organisation.
Why servicePath™ is Built for the Post-SteelBrick Reality
That’s exactly why servicePath™ CPQ+ exists.
We’ve helped sales, ops, and finance teams untangle themselves from bloated CPQ systems, without trading one problem for another. Our platform brings back the flexibility and speed that made SteelBrick so appealing in the first place, only with modern infrastructure, real enterprise scalability, and none of the lock-in.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Replacing Salesforce CPQ without the pain
At servicePath™, we’ve helped companies:
Deploy new quoting environments in as little as 6 to 10 weeks
Migrate core logic and approval rules without rebuilding from scratch
Preserve (and improve) key quoting functionality that was lost during Salesforce updates
Avoid the steep learning curves and long consulting engagements that come with bundled platforms
And we do it all without disrupting your day-to-day operations.
Built for complexity without becoming complex
servicePath™ handles:
Advanced product configurations
Tiered pricing and volume discounts
Multi-step approvals and margin governance
Usage-based models and subscription renewals
But we also believe you should be able to change these things yourself — not file a ticket or call a consultant every time your product team updates the catalog.
No more blackboxes
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from former Salesforce CPQ users is this: “We don’t know how it works anymore.”
With servicePath™, that’s never the case.
You control your workflows, pricing logic, and approval rules
There’s no hidden logic or proprietary language
Your sales ops and pricing teams can maintain and adapt the system without relying on developers
It’s time to move on from Salesforce CPQ
