SaaS vendors do these business value assessments, which are useful to the executive buyer and the vendor. The issue I find with them is customers don't want to do them in collaboration with the vendor since the vendor will use that to justify higher prices. 'Outcome' and 'business value' seem somewhat synonymous - so maybe need to focus on the business value more closely (and all the modelling that goes into that). I don't know if all of the billing needs to go through this, but perhaps discounts or bonuses could - at the very least helping with retention.

This is interesting, but it seems to be at odds with SaaS models where the idea can be you get high margins because you get low usage generally.

I can see why people buying/using software would want this, but why would any software startup want to use it? What are the markets (other than non-profit), where pay vs success (and not attention/friction) is the limiting factor? The idea is you’re unlocking new markets or models, right?

And when/how is success measured? Otherwise it’s just like API billing, right?

This sounds really great in concept.

I don't see detail here. As someone who would be interested in using this, can you clearly explain how you will measure and track the outcomes? That's the key detail that matters.

Relying on customers to self-report is not sufficient, and an automated self-report-system is not a true improvement.

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'd be very interested to hear more about how the non-for-profit agents platform went/anything else you learnt.

Congrats on the launch guys, but is this any different from setting up usage based pricing in stripe? This kind of seems like a solution in search of a problem.