Outcome-based pricing

Bain & Company's April 2026 brief on the Rule of 40 lists outcome-based pricing as one of four tailwinds, alongside sales productivity, EBITDA transformation, and incumbent workflow lock-in. The framing there is blunt: revenue moves from fixed seats to labor and operations economics. The same brief carries the counterweight, a marketing technology client whose AI costs rose 349% while revenue grew 38% over a year.

The vocabulary comes from Elliot Greenwald at Sierra, who published the founding text on 10 December 2024. Greenwald places outcome-based pricing at the end of a four-stage genealogy: shrink-wrapped software, seat-based SaaS, consumption-based, then agents. The billing unit is a completed outcome (a resolved support conversation, a saved cancellation, an upsell, a cross-sell), and an unresolved conversation usually carries no charge. Greenwald names the structural conflict that follows: a legacy CX vendor earning per seat sees its own revenue shrink as its AI gets better, while a pure player paid per resolution does not.

The same logic surfaces outside software. The VoxComm report and Joe Mandese's March 2026 MediaPost piece argue that billable hours are structurally disqualified, with agency margins cited at 30% in the golden age against a 10% current average, and creatives producing roughly 5 times the output for the same pay as ten years ago. Tim Williams reads the hourly model as a misalignment: agencies are rewarded for more hours, clients are incentivized to minimize them. What none of these sources settle is who absorbs the cost when an outcome fails to complete.