Salesforce.com Sold basic version, forced to agree to a new 1 year term for any changes at any time, only allow data downloads once per month. San Francisco California

I am a small business owner, who had used salesforce.com at previous companies and at other jobs.  I was familiar with it, so we adopted the service about three years ago.  Fortunately our business has grown, and we needed more licences, and more functionality, so we called salesforce.com, thinking we woul dbe treated like a growing account.  

This was not the case.  The salesperson informed us that in order to upgrade our service, we would have to agree to a fresh 1 year contract (we have 3 months left on our current contract), and secondly salesforce.com would only accept up front payment terms for the whole year - take it or leave it.  This would have trippled our monthly cost, and previously we had been paying quarterly.  

The salesperson was very agressive, and she would ask questions like "when can I expect you to make a decision?, today? tomorrow?"  All this shortly after telling us too bad if we didn't want to shell out a $4,000 unexpected additional expense to them up front.  When was the last time you paid a year up front for anything, unless you got some kind of discount.  There were no discounts offered for providing such a cash flow advance to salesforce.com.  By the way, all their prices are listed as "monthly" on their website, but in the fine print you see *billed annually.  Way to set peoples expectation for paying a few hundred dollars a month for 3-4 licences, to having salespeople demand all the money up front. 

So now after being a good customer for 3 years, and paying them about $6-7,000 over that time, now we're printing out spreadsheets and call lists for our newly hired sales person instead of adding a new licence.  Its like salesforce.com sent us back in time 10 years.  

Oh and here is the most frustrating part - sometime over the past two years, they removed the ability to download your data freely.  With our non-upgraded licence, we can only download the data once per month.  So forget about getting your information back in a timely manner if you want to switch CRM systems.  

This experience has been like quick sand, and instead of being a usefull tool provided by a vendor that acts like a business partner, salesforce.com instead has found ways to turn the screws and hold you hostage to the prices and payment terms that are at their advantage, and are totally uncustomary, and falesly advertised.  How can you buy something at the start, and have functions taken away along the road that trap you into the service?   Very unethical given the company's mantra and the trust businesses place in them to store and manage their data. 

The are other, less expensive and just as effective options out there.  Beware and do your homework, or you'll be in our position paying two employees salaries while the key tool they use - salesforce.com isn't available to them.  This hasn't cost us the $4,000 that we would be ransomed to pay for the new service, its cost us tens of thousands of dollars in wasted salaries and lost productivity.