Outcome-based pricing (or result-based pricing) is becoming popularized again due to services powered by artificial intelligence that are enable intent-based outcome specification. That means charging per unit of value which is the desired outcome.
Examples
Intercom’s new AI chat service charges $0.99 per successful resolution (customer indicates issue resolved or they stop responding). In most SaaS business models, pricing would be per seat where the measurement of value is how many people the service enables to do their work. Now that AI, in some cases, can perform the work autonomously, revenue models for these companies can more closely resemble the actual job to be done—resolved support tickets in this case.
11x provides an autonomous SDR agent AI. Rather than charge per seat, they started by charging per task—identifying accounts, researching accounts, writing email and LinkedIn messages, scheduling meetings, and so on. Tasks completed makes the outcome clear, “you pay us money, we do these tasks for you that you can easily verify and attribute as real work a person would otherwise have to do.” An even more intent-based pricing plan would be to charge per qualified lead but I can see how that wouldn’t work since there are many variables out of the control of 11x when it comes to getting someone to book a meeting which means charging by output rather than outcome probably works best.
See also:
- Service-as-software might lead to more outcome-based pricing for a greater range of categories
- Pricing the perceived value gap
- Willingness to pay should be at the core of product design
Links to this note
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When Does a Service-as-Software Model Make Sense?
The service-as-software model is nacsent but expected to be experimented with in different fields as artificial intelligence techniques improve and enable new applications.
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Service as software is the inverse of software as a service. Rather than building software for people to do their job, service-as-software uses AI to fulfill the intent directly and more faithfully sell solutions not software.