If your product does the work, charging per seat doesn’t make sense. The better your agent gets, the fewer people the customer needs, and the fewer seats you sell. Seat pricing punishes the exact thing you are trying to deliver.
Most of our portfolio has moved, or is moving, to pricing tied to the work completed. It’s the right model, but it’s harder to get right than it sounds. Here is what we’ve learned from dozens of these contracts.
Pick a unit the customer already counts
The best pricing unit is one the buyer already tracks and already pays for: a claim adjudicated, a prior authorization submitted, a ledger reconciled, an alert closed. If the customer has to learn a new metric to understand your invoice, the deal will stall in procurement.
Price the unit of work your customer already budgets for, not the unit of compute you happen to consume.
Anchor to the old cost, not to your cost
Customers compare your price with what the work costs today: in-house staff, an outsourcer or overtime. Founders often anchor to their own inference costs instead and leave a lot of value on the table. A common starting point is 30 to 50 percent of the current fully loaded cost per unit. That is a clear saving for the customer and leaves strong margins for you as automation rates rise.
Define “done” before you sign
Outcome pricing only works if both sides agree on what counts as an outcome. Strong contracts spell out:
- What qualifies as a completed unit, and who confirms it.
- How exceptions handed back to people are counted and priced.
- Quality thresholds, and what happens when they are missed.
- A minimum annual commitment, so revenue stays predictable for both sides.
Use a hybrid to get started
Early in a relationship, pure usage pricing can make buyers nervous about runaway costs and leave you with unpredictable revenue. Many of our companies start with a platform fee plus a committed volume of work units, with overage pricing above that. As trust grows, the per-unit component becomes most of the contract.
What we look for in diligence
We look at net revenue retention driven by volume rather than seats, gross margin per unit over time, and how often customers move more workflows onto the platform. When those three trends point up together, it’s strong evidence that the product is replacing work and not just assisting with it.