Outcome-Based Pricing

Outcome-based pricing charges for results delivered rather than seats occupied or units consumed: per support ticket resolved, per qualified lead booked, per invoice collected. It rose alongside AI agents because they broke the older models both ways — agents replace seats (shrinking per-user revenue) and their token consumption is invisible to buyers (making usage pricing feel arbitrary). Intercom's Fin, priced per resolution, is the canonical example. The appeal is perfect alignment: the customer pays only when the product demonstrably worked, which collapses purchase risk. The hard parts are definitional and financial — vendor and customer must agree on what counts as an outcome (is a ticket "resolved" if the user gives up?), attribution must be auditable, revenue becomes less predictable than subscriptions, and the vendor absorbs the model's failure rate in its margin. Hybrids dominate in practice: a platform fee for access plus outcome fees on top.