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UPSTREAM · PARDOT ALTERNATIVE
For B2B teams paying $1,250–$15,000+/mo on Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Pardot is a marketing app
on top of your Salesforce data.

Your Salesforce CRM is already the source of truth — Pardot is just a UI for nurture flows, scoring, and email sends sitting on top of it. We rebuild as a Salesforce-native app (Lightning components + Apex + a sidecar in your AWS) on direct AWS SES billing. Your SFDC stays untouched. The Pardot license becomes optional.

Fixed price from $24,000·5–7 weeks to ship·
Typical B2B SaaS · 25K Pardot prospects · Plus tier

Pardot Plus · 25K prospects

~12 nurture programs · 4 marketers · ad attribution
Pardot Plus Y1 spend$0
Direct (SFDC + SES + sidecar)~$0
Allied BizTech rebuild (one-time)$0
Hosting + maintenance (per year)$0
3-YEAR RECLAIM · INDICATIVE
$0
Build payback
~12 months
Y2+ saving
~$25K/yr
Code
Yours

Math compounds: at Advanced or Premium tier with 75K+ prospects, Y1 reclaim crosses $70K.

The math · every Pardot tier

Pardot bills per tier + per prospect over the cap.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (the new official name for Pardot) ships fixed-tier pricing with prospect-count caps. Past the cap, additional prospects get billed per 1,000. The tier upgrade economics get rough fast.

Pardot tier · prospects
Pardot / yr
Direct (rebuild amortised)
Y1 reclaim after build
Growth · 10K prospectssmall B2B · early demand-gen
~$15,000
~$26,400 Y1 / $2,400 Y2+
Skip — too small
Plus · 25K prospectsscaling B2B · sweet spot
~$30,000
~$26,400 Y1 / $2,400 Y2+
~$3,600 Y1 + $25K/yr after
Advanced · 50K prospectsestablished mid-market B2B
~$48,000
~$28,800 Y1 / $4,800 Y2+
~$19,200 Y1
Advanced · 100K prospectsB2B SaaS · large-enterprise sales
~$72,000
~$32,000 Y1 / $8,000 Y2+
~$40,000 Y1
Premium · 75K prospects + business unitsenterprise B2B · multi-BU
~$180,000+
~$45,000 Y1 / $21,000 Y2+
~$135,000 Y1

Pardot list prices May 2026. Direct numbers based on AWS SES + a Salesforce-native sidecar app + workflow engine + Allied $24K rebuild amortised over Year 1. Salesforce CRM licence is unaffected — we don't rebuild SFDC, we rebuild the Pardot layer that sits on top of it.

What we'd build instead

Three layers. Salesforce stays untouched.

Lightning components + Apex inside your SFDC org for the marketing UX your team already knows. A sidecar app in your AWS for the heavy lifting (email rendering, queue management, attribution). AWS SES for the actual sends.

LAYER 1 · LIGHTNING
SFDC-native UI
  • Lightning components in your existing SFDC org
  • Email composer + nurture flow editor
  • Lead scoring + grading rules
  • Lifecycle stage management
  • Custom objects for campaign data
  • Permission set follows your SFDC profile
LAYER 2 · SIDECAR
App in your AWS
  • Email rendering engine (variables, templates)
  • Job queue (BullMQ / SQS)
  • Attribution layer (UTM + multi-touch)
  • Landing page hosting (Cloudflare Workers)
  • Form ingestion + Salesforce push
  • Suppression / GDPR / CCPA compliance
LAYER 3 · DELIVERY
Direct providers
  • AWS SES — bulk sends · ~$0.10 / 1K
  • Postmark — transactional / nurture-critical
  • SPF / DKIM / DMARC on your domain
  • Dedicated IP if needed
  • Stripe / Twilio / LinkedIn API direct

Salesforce CRM is untouched — your SFDC contract stays exactly as-is. The Pardot license becomes the only thing that drops at next renewal. Your sales team doesn't notice the change.

What's preserved · what's dropped

We rebuild the 12 features your demand-gen team uses.

Pardot ships dozens of features bundled per tier. B2B marketing teams typically use ~12 daily. We rebuild those, drop the long tail, and add things Pardot's per-tier pricing actively penalises.

CORE — PRESERVED 1:1
Email send + nurture programstrigger-based · drip · branching
Lead scoring + gradingbehavioural points + demographic letters
Engagement Studio (visual flows)if/then branches · timing · escalation
Landing pages + formsprogressive profiling · hidden fields · dependent picklists
Salesforce syncnative — same org, no inter-cloud sync needed
Campaign attributionfirst-touch / last-touch / multi-touch · ROI dashboards
Email rendering previewacross clients + DPI · mobile-first
Activity trackingpage views, downloads, form submits, email opens
PARTIAL — REBUILT BUT DIFFERENT
Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio)If you use it, that's a separate engagement; bring your own personalization or skip
~
Einstein scoring / Einstein EngagementReplaced with Anthropic / OpenAI direct + custom scoring; comparable quality
~
DROPPED — ON PURPOSE
Pardot Trailhead / Salesforce certificationsYour team's existing SFDC training transfers; Pardot-specific cert isn't needed
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement long-tail featuresMost exist to justify Premium pricing; we build to your team's actual workflow
NEW — PARDOT DOESN'T DO
No prospect-count taxStoring 200K leads in SFDC + your sidecar costs ~$0; Pardot bills you ~$3–6K extra per quarter
SQL access to your campaign dataSidecar's Postgres is queryable from your warehouse
No Marketing Cloud Connect overheadNo B2BMA / Engagement History sync layer to maintain
Pricing

Fixed price. Salesforce-native.

One number, one ship date. Sized by prospect count and Salesforce org complexity.

⭐ Pardot rebuild · up to 50K prospects

From $24,000 — fixed

$24,000 · one-time
5–7 weeks · 2-week pilot · 90-day warranty
  • Lightning components in your existing SFDC org
  • Engagement Studio replacement — visual nurture flow builder
  • Lead scoring + grading — behavioural + demographic rules
  • AWS SES + Postmark integration on your accounts
  • Landing pages + forms — progressive profiling, dependent fields
  • Sidecar app in your AWS — Postgres-backed campaign data
  • Migration of all Pardot programs + lists + scoring rules + landing pages
  • Code in your GitHub from day one
  • 2-week pilot on one nurture program before cutover
Get my Pardot rebuild quote →

24-hour quote turnaround · NDA on request

SCALE TIER · 100K+ PROSPECTS
Multi-region deploy + advanced attribution: $32,000–$42,000.
MULTI-BU TIER (PREMIUM REPLACE)
Multi-BU isolation, separate domains, audit logs: $48,000–$72,000.
+ MARKETING CLOUD CONNECT REBUILD
If you have SFMC + Pardot, rebuild the connector + drop both: +$18,000–$28,000.
RUNNING IT FOR YOU
Allied BizTech-managed at $2,400/yr covers VPS + monitoring + monthly updates.
The "Pardot alternatives" listicles miss the point

Why we don't recommend the obvious switches.

"Pardot alternative" results: HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, Act-On. Same wrapper economics — sometimes higher per-contact pricing, plus Salesforce migration cost.

PATH A · Switch to HubSpot
"Better UX."
HubSpot UX is genuinely better than Pardot's. Comparable per-contact economics. Plus you have to migrate the Salesforce data layer + retrain the sales team. See HubSpot rebuild.
PATH B · Switch to Marketo
"Adobe enterprise."
Marketo (Adobe) is comparable to Pardot Premium pricing. Same per-contact economics, deeper enterprise features you might not need. Migration is 4–6 months.
PATH C · Eloqua / Act-On
"Niche enterprise."
Both are competent. Eloqua skews more enterprise; Act-On more mid-market. Same wrapper economics, different brand.
PATH D · Customer.io / Mailgun
"Cleaner pricing."
Customer.io has cleaner per-event pricing. Loses the Salesforce-native advantage Pardot offers. Most B2B teams don't want to give that up.
PATH E · Hire a freelancer
"$15K on Upwork."
You'll get email + a basic SFDC component. Workflow engine, scoring, attribution, GDPR — on you. The 80% Allied builds.
PATH F · Negotiate Pardot down
"Salesforce account exec calls."
Salesforce reps will discount Pardot 15–25% on annual commits, especially when bundled with SFDC renewal. Wrapper margin is 80%+ — negotiation captures less than 1/4 of rebuild value.
Questions about a Pardot rebuild

"What about…"

Will my Salesforce data sync break?
No — that's the entire point of the architecture. The marketing app lives inside your Salesforce org as Lightning components, so there's no inter-cloud sync to break. Your sales team sees the same lead activity on opportunities they see today.
What about Engagement Studio programs?
Migrated. We export every Engagement Studio program (steps + branches + timing), translate to the new visual editor, and verify the same lead populations transition through the same stages on a sample. Marketers' existing playbooks transfer 1:1.
What about Pardot landing page URLs?
301-redirect from your old Pardot URLs (`go.pardot.com/...`) to your new domain-hosted equivalents. Existing campaign links keep working forever.
What about deliverability + Pardot's reputation?
SPF / DKIM / DMARC on your sending domain. We warm a dedicated AWS SES IP for 2–4 weeks before cutover. Most clients see equal or better deliverability post-cutover because reputation is no longer pooled with Pardot's worst-actor customers.
How does this affect our Salesforce contract?
It doesn't. Your Sales Cloud / Service Cloud / etc. licenses stay exactly as-is — those have value beyond Pardot. Only the Pardot / MCAE add-on becomes optional at next renewal. Salesforce account execs won't love this; they'll survive.
Who owns the code?
You. Apex + Lightning code in your SFDC org's package. Sidecar code in your GitHub. Allied BizTech retains no rights and no copy.

Why this number works: AI-paired senior engineers raise the floor on quality + consistency · 250+ products shipped · direct vendor billing — you keep the wrapper margin. → The full method

UPSTREAM · PARDOT REBUILD

Keep Salesforce. Drop the Pardot markup.

From $24,000 fixed. 5–7 weeks to ship. Lightning-native; sidecar in your AWS. Salesforce CRM untouched. No deck-pitch — send your Pardot tier + prospect count + SFDC org size, we send a quote in 24 hours.

15+ years · ISO 9001:2015 · 250+ shipped · MSA · SOW · DPA ready · refundable against any larger Upstream engagement.