People.ai pricing, features and alternatives
People.ai earns its place when your CRM activity data is incomplete because reps do not log consistently, and the reporting that depends on it keeps being wrong. The company renamed itself Backstory in April 2026 and still publishes no prices: you are charged for the customer-facing people whose activity it ingests and for the answers your team consumes, with everything confirmed in a quote.
The short answer
Buy People.ai if you run Salesforce at enterprise scale with complex account teams, manual activity logging has already failed, and RevOps has named the reports and meetings that will use the captured data. Reviewers on G2 and Reddit's r/salesforce credit it with removing rote Salesforce updates from reps' days, which is the clearest return it offers.
Skip it if what you want is call recording and coaching, because that is a different product: Gong and the rest of the conversation intelligence category record and analyse the conversation rather than capture the activity. Skip it too if you are a small team where logging is manageable, or if nobody will build routines around the data.
Where People.ai fits
People.ai captures sales activity, emails and meetings among it, matches it to accounts and opportunities and writes it to the CRM without rep effort, then uses that data for relationship and account insight. The reason it is an enterprise product rather than a general one is that the problem it solves scales with org complexity: a ten-person team can be told to log their meetings, and a thousand-person team with overlapping account teams, channel partners and customer success cannot. Capterra reviewers mention building customer maps in Salesforce that show who is engaged at each account, which is the output account planning consumes.
The dependency to establish first is matching accuracy on your own data rather than on a clean demo org. Shared email domains, subsidiaries, resellers and personal addresses are where automatic capture degrades, and the failure is quiet: activity attaches to the wrong account and the coverage report looks better than reality. Test it on your messiest accounts, and settle what the system does when it cannot decide. Our CRM data audit checklist is the structure for working out how much of your current reporting gap is logging and how much is matching.
The second dependency is managerial rather than technical, and it is the one the reviews flag. A Software Advice reviewer says their team does not use it enough and wants more push-style reporting, which is the characteristic failure of this category: the capture works, nobody changes what they look at, and the data sits in Salesforce being correct. Agree before rollout which meetings and which reports will use the data, name who owns them, and put the pipeline hygiene rules in writing so the captured activity is being compared with an agreed standard rather than a mood.
Privacy and capture scope belong in the rollout plan, not in a later escalation. The platform reads email and calendar activity for the people you connect, so decide with legal and with your works council or equivalent how personal and sensitive mail is excluded, what retention applies, and what a rep can see about their own captured data. Ask the vendor to show the exclusion mechanism rather than describe it, because this is the question that stalls an otherwise agreed rollout at the last review.
Place it against the category before you negotiate, since the alternatives are not interchangeable. If call analysis is the data you want, the comparison is Gong and the head to head worth reading is Clari against Gong. If the forecast process is the goal, Clari competes. If automatic activity capture is the whole requirement, Nektar and Ebsta are the direct tests, and they are cheaper conversations to have. All of them sit in our revenue intelligence software directory.
People.ai pricing
People.ai, now trading as Backstory after an April 2026 rename reported by Business Wire on April 21, 2026, does not publish prices. What it does publish is the model, which is more useful than most quote-only vendors manage: you pay for the people whose customer activity the platform ingests, meaning reps, customer success, channel and anyone else talking to customers, and for the answers your team consumes, such as deal summaries, surfaced risks and questions answered. Managers, finance, deal desk and ops can use it without a seat, and every customer gets the full product rather than feature tiers, so there is no edition decision to negotiate.
Five things set the number, and the last one is where the surprises live.
- The count of connected customer-facing people. This is the primary unit, and it is not the same as your sales headcount: ask what counts as a connected person before you estimate, because adding customer success or partner managers can grow the bill faster than hiring reps does.
- The consumption allotment that comes with each connected person, which pools across the organization. Ask for the size of the pool in whatever unit the vendor uses, and ask how an answer is counted, since a dashboard that refreshes and a question a manager types may not cost the same.
- Who consumes those answers. Because viewers need no seat, consumption can grow without anybody buying anything, which is pleasant in year one and the mechanism behind a renewal increase in year two.
- True Forward, which is the vendor's name for its overage approach: if you exceed the allotment nothing shuts off and nothing is back-billed, but the contract is resized at renewal. This is a genuinely buyer-friendly structure mid-term and a repricing event at the end of it.
- Contract term and the renewal cap, which together decide whether the resizing is a negotiation or an invoice. Ask for a cap on how much the renewal can rise, in writing, before you sign the first term.
There is no public figure for People.ai and no third-party benchmark for it in our data, so we are not going to estimate one for you. What you can do is make the quote legible: ask for the per-person annual rate, the definition of a connected person, the pooled allotment and the unit it is measured in, how an answer is counted, and a cap on renewal growth. Then ask your pilot to produce a consumption number so the renewal conversation starts from evidence rather than from the vendor's estimate. Our revenue intelligence RFP template puts those questions in a form every vendor in the category has to answer the same way, and how we review software explains why a quote-only vendor gets no price table here.
What People.ai gives up
You give up knowing the price before a sales conversation, and you give up comparing it on a spreadsheet. Nothing is published at any tier, there is no entry plan, and because the unit is connected people rather than licences, even a per-seat comparison with a tool that does publish rates needs translating first. Run two quotes in parallel rather than in sequence.
You give up cost certainty at renewal, which is the structural trade in this model. True Forward means nothing is cut off and nothing is back-billed mid-term, and in exchange the contract is resized when it renews. For a team whose consumption grows because the product worked, that is a rising renewal caused by success, so cap it in the first contract while the vendor still wants your signature.
You give up value unless somebody changes what they look at. The platform fills in the activity record; it does not run your pipeline review. One reviewer's team underuses it and wants push-style reporting, which is a fair request and also a description of the gap: without named reports and a named owner, you have bought cleaner data and the same meetings.
You give up call-level insight. This is activity capture and relationship data, not conversation intelligence, so there are no recordings to coach against and no call scorecard to review. If a manager's real question is how a rep handled an objection, you want Gong and the coaching habit that goes with it, and buying this instead will not answer it.
You give up a self-serve trial. The route is sales-led, so insist on a pilot across a representative set of accounts, including the subsidiaries and shared-domain accounts that break matching. That raises the cost of looking, which is the argument for scoping the pilot tightly and writing down what a pass looks like before it starts.
How People.ai compares
Four of the six rows below publish nothing, which is normal in revenue intelligence and the reason this category is hard to budget. The split that matters is what data you are buying. People.ai, Nektar and Ebsta capture activity and relationships: the record of who talked to whom. Gong captures and analyses the conversation itself. Clari competes where the forecast process is the reason for the purchase. Scratchpad is the honest cheap answer for a team whose real complaint is that updating Salesforce is slow. Published figures come from each product's own file and our September 2026 check.
| Tool | Best for | Price | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| People.ai | Enterprise Salesforce teams whose activity data is incomplete | Custom quote, priced per connected customer-facing person plus pooled consumption | Quote-only, consumption is resized at renewal, and value depends on managers changing their reports |
| Gong | Teams whose coaching and deal reviews need the conversation itself | Custom quote; per-user licences plus a platform fee | Quote-only, and the platform fee does not scale down for small teams |
| Clari | Forecast discipline and pipeline inspection as the primary job | Custom quote at every tier | Quote-only, and it needs clean opportunity data before the forecast output is worth reading |
| Nektar | Activity capture as the single requirement, without the wider platform | Custom quote; data backfill add-on $8/user per month of history | Quote-only, and historical backfill is priced separately by how far back you go |
| Ebsta | Relationship intelligence alongside activity capture for mid-market teams | Custom quote across its conversation, relationship and revenue products | Quote-only, and the three products are sold separately rather than as one platform |
| Scratchpad | Making Salesforce updates fast for reps at a published rate | Free tier; $19/user/month Solo; $49/user/month Team, billed annually | It speeds up manual logging rather than removing it, and captures nothing on its own |
What to test in a People.ai pilot
Sales-led evaluation means the pilot is yours to design, so run it on a representative set of accounts rather than a tidy one. The two findings that decide the purchase are matching accuracy on hard accounts and the consumption number you will be renewed against, and both take real data and a few weeks to produce.
- Pick twenty accounts that break things, shared domains, subsidiaries, resellers and one account with two active opportunities, and measure how often activity lands on the right account and the right opportunity.
- Check what happens when the match is ambiguous: does it guess, queue the record or drop it? Then ask who reviews the queue in production and how long that takes each week.
- Ask which users count toward pricing, everyone captured or only those who log in, and get the answer in writing. This single definition can move the quote by a third.
- Measure consumption during the pilot in the vendor's own unit, with viewers using it the way they would after rollout. That figure is what True Forward resizes against at renewal, so it belongs in the business case now.
- Name the two reports and the one meeting that will use the captured data, and have the people who own them run a real pipeline review from it. If they would not do it again unprompted, the purchase has no return.
- Test how personal and sensitive email is excluded, and have legal and your privacy reviewer sign off on what is captured and retained before any wider rollout.
- Build one customer map for a complex account and show it to the account team. Ask whether it changed who they plan to contact next quarter.
- Close the commercial questions before the pilot ends: the per-person annual rate, the definition of a connected person, the pooled allotment and its unit, how an answer is counted, the term, a renewal cap, and your export rights on captured activity if you leave.
People.ai questions buyers ask
What is People.ai used for?
Capturing sales activity automatically, writing it to the CRM, and using it for relationship mapping and pipeline insight.
How much does People.ai cost?
People.ai, now called Backstory, does not publish pricing. It charges for each connected customer-facing person plus a pooled consumption allotment for AI answers, and viewers need no seat. Ask for the per-person rate and how renewal is sized.
Does People.ai work with Salesforce?
Yes. Reviewers describe using it to automate Salesforce updates and build customer maps in Salesforce.
Is there a free trial for People.ai?
People.ai sells through a sales-led process. Ask for a pilot on a subset of accounts to measure capture accuracy.
Who are People.ai's main competitors?
Gong and Clari overlap for revenue intelligence. Nektar and Ebsta are other revenue intelligence tools worth comparing on activity capture.
How does People.ai work?
It connects to the email and calendar of your customer-facing people, matches that activity to accounts and opportunities, and writes it into the CRM without rep effort. The captured data then feeds relationship maps, account coverage views and engagement signals that managers use in pipeline reviews.