Comment by abxyz
Outcome-based billing is interesting. I think some people may balk at the idea of trusting customers to self-report their outcomes but self-reporting already happens often in enterprise billing. A customer can defraud their service providers by underreporting but the risk to their relationship with the service provider is rarely worth it (if the service isn't delivering value, drop it, if the service is delivering value, the fees are worth it). SaaS companies are already regularly writing off unpaid bills. That said...
https://www.useskope.com/resources/why-now
"Salesforce, Sierra, Zendesk, and Intercom are a few of the early movers in adopting an outcome based model. Their definitions of a 'successful outcome' vary from simply facilitating a conversation (Salesforce) to completing a customer support query with no human elevation needed (Sierra)."
"Chargeflow is another company that automates the process of collecting revenue and preventing chargebacks for ecommerce, which has adopted this model. They take 25% of each recovery and charge $39 for each chargeback prevention. Their pricing page explains the idea perfectly: success first, pay second."
Are these examples of "outcome-based billing" or just the redefinition of usage and/or fees as an "outcome"? "Facilitating a conversation" and "completing a support query" are not trust-based outcomes, that's just usage. A thing happened within the service's boundary. Stripe's usage based billing (and Orb etc.) can be used for this already.
I guess you are in a tough position because you are trying to provide real world examples of a category you are hoping to define, but in this case, perhaps it's best to wait for some clear real world examples instead of muddying the waters like this. I fear that reading this, most people would conclude that outcome-based billing is just a way to define your usage-based pricing, rather than something that needs a platform like Skope.
> I guess you are in a tough position because you are trying to provide real world examples of a category you are hoping to define, but in this case, perhaps it's best to wait for some clear real world examples instead of muddying the waters like this. I fear that reading this, most people would conclude that outcome-based billing is just a way to define your usage-based pricing, rather than something that needs a platform like Skope.
You're right in that the cases of real-world examples are rare, but I believe it's only in software. The concept of outcome-based pricing have always existed throughout different work for a long, long time – think about test-prep service that promises to only need to pay if you get X score, real-estate agent that carry commission as a % of sale price, etc.
I think this instills confidence in something like this and makes me wonder why such pricing models haven't been applied to tech yet.