Outcome-Based Pricing

Outcome-based pricing is a model in which the customer pays for a completed result, a resolved support ticket, a booked meeting, a saved cancellation, rather than for software access, seats, or compute time. It is the pricing primitive most associated with GaaS (Agentic AI as a Service).

Outcome pricing is what structurally separates GaaS from SaaS: revenue scales with work delivered, not seats sold. Its hard problem is measurement, defining an "outcome" precisely enough, and verifying it reliably enough, to bill on it. Contracts vary widely on what counts as a successful outcome and how multi-step or handed-off interactions are counted, which is where most negotiation happens.

Related terms: Post-SaaS · Agent Orchestration See also: What is GaaS? · GaaS vs SaaS