Force.com Free Edition is quite challenging, isn’t it?

Recently a big player of SaaS market has challenged the rest of competitors. The offer is really tempting.

From now on there is an option to create an account on Force.com, that can be deployed by 100 users for free.

Force.com Platform offers a whole lot of things such as a database, integration, business logic, reporting, user interface, API, configurable UI and more. I think Force.com is still a platform more oriented on developers, then business users.

So, the Terms & Conditions attached to the Free Force.com account:

• 100 Users
• 10 Custom Objects per user
• 10MB storage per user (so 1GB in total)
• Various restrictions are Sites and processing time

I guess Salesforce won’t enforce these limits, making it customer’s responsibility to check if the particular user can access more than 10 custom objects, etc. I suppose Salesforce will audit those accounts and in case the limits are violated pushing them purchase a full-version license.

Frankly, I think that current pricing 50$/user/month is too expensive for a simple app. So, Salesforce decision to offer a free version is really a good idea.

Besides, it must influence the policy of other vendors somehow. They must be pretty concerned. What are they thinking about this?