Orion to charge vendors for API access; Salesforce to meter AI calls

Orion is going to charge technology providers for API access, and Salesforce is going to meter AI agent calls at a rate it has not published, according to an Oct. 23 column on WealthManagement.com.

The column walks through the mechanism. A technology vendor starts receiving an invoice for a connection to a platform whose mutual clients already pay for that platform, and it has three options. It can pass the charge through, leaving the RIA with a new surcharge for the same service. It can drop the integration, and the RIA loses the efficiency the connector delivered. Or it can absorb the cost, which the column calls quietly the worst of the three because the money comes out of its innovation roadmap.

For an advisor, the charge rarely appears as a line item labeled API access. It turns up at renewal as a higher quote, in a connector that stops being maintained, or in a product roadmap that ships late. Switching vendors is not an escape: the column notes that a conversion carries licensing fees, project costs and lost productivity. The question to put to a platform before the next contract is whether the connector carries a price, and which party is invoiced for it.

The column does not argue that software should be free. APIs cost real money to build and more to secure, it says, and an unprofitable vendor cannot build anything worth connecting to. Its recommendation is narrower: charge transparently for the value delivered and let clients decide whether it is worth it.

It offers three precedents. Nils Bohlin designed Volvo's three-point seat belt in 1959, and Volvo gave the patent to its competitors on the view that it was worth more in every car than in its own alone; the column cites Volvo's own count of more than a million lives. Merck has supplied Mectizan free since 1987, as much as needed for as long as needed, and river blindness has been eradicated from four countries, according to the column. Anthropic published MCP free and open in November 2024 and handed it to the Linux Foundation so that nobody could own it; OpenAI and Google adopted it.

The column's worry is direction of travel. It says industry surveys consistently identify weak integration as the thing holding advisors back, that the past decade brought improvement, and that these recent announcements pull the other way.

What would make the cost legible is a published rate for AI agent calls. Salesforce has not published one, according to the column, which leaves the renewal conversation as the likely place the number surfaces.