> Looks cool, but honestly what companies need a Salesforce like too but can't afford Salesforce force ?

Consider the example of APRA-regulated entities (banks and super funds who do business in Australia, for example): APRA's CPS230, which describes the requirements for business continuity, requires that you not lock yourself into a single vendor for a variety of critical functions, which means you need to explain how you'll keep your bank running if the relationship with that vendor is severed.

Depending on the function - for example, if it's considered "country-sustaining" or "bank-sustaining" - APRA may require you can do that in a matter of minutes through to hours. You may be very happy running Salesforce as your primary vendor - but if you want to be able to explain how you can run critical functions in the event of SF deleting your account a la Google, or a commercial breakdown, or whatever, having something that you could hydrate your data into, repoint your systems to their APIs, and keep basic functionality going is a very useful BCP to be able to demonstrate.

That's spot-on.

We have a proposal review meeting with an Australian insurance company scheduled for this Thursday.

That's a great question and we have great answers from actual clients - the repeating pattern goes as follows:

"We invested three years building this app, it's a booming success, but their user-based pricing is killing us"

"We can't run complex queries"

"It's too slow"

"We feel our data is stuck there"

"I want to own my code and my application"

"Why do I need to use APEX where we use Java and JS everywhere else in the company"

Okay so this isn't really for end users, it's not for Billy Bob's shop which needs to use Salesforce to track cupcake orders, but rather a vendor who would sell Salesforce like software to Billy Bob with some light customization on top.

Understood, thank you for your answer and I wish you the best of luck!

Honestly, I don't think there are many (revenue speaking) Billy Bob's shops using Salesforce to track their cupcake orders out there.

Bad example, but generally this is more of a framework for building Sales tracking software vs a direct Salesforce competitor, right?