Output-Based Pricing

Output-based pricing charges for a unit of work the software has completed, such as a resolved support ticket, a qualified lead or a drafted document. It sits between usage-based pricing, which bills for resources consumed, and outcome-based pricing, which bills for a verified change in the customer’s business.

Intercom’s Fin charges $0.99 per resolved support conversation and $9.99 per qualified sales lead. Sierra charges roughly $1.00 to $2.50 per resolved session. Each of those is a state change inside the vendor’s own software. None of them measures money moving in the buyer’s business, which is what would make it an outcome.

Potio’s take: Nearly everything marketed as outcome-based pricing is output-based pricing. When Potio checked seventeen enterprise software and AI agent vendors selling on outcome positioning, three billed on a real business outcome. That is no criticism of outputs. The strongest output you can defend beats a weak metric that sits closer to the outcome.

How this plays out

The name comes from the inputs to impact chain used in program evaluation. Inputs are resources consumed, activities are work attempted, outputs are work completed and outcomes are business results.

Output pricing is still a real step beyond usage pricing, because failure risk moves to the vendor. Under usage pricing, twelve turns of inference that end in an escalation to a human are twelve turns billed. Under output pricing the vendor pays for those turns and invoices nothing.

That transfer creates problems of its own:

• Definitions drift. “Resolved” collects exclusions: a 48 to 72 hour lookback window, sessions under three exchanges, bot traffic, escalations caused by system errors, low satisfaction scores and audit rights.
• Both sides game the meter. The vendor gains from closing sessions early. The buyer gains from routing the last message through a human so the session never qualifies.
• Margin inverts on hard cases. Complex requests burn the most compute and are the most likely to fail the resolution test.
• Metering becomes a product. Tracking state across multi-day lookback windows, with an audit trail behind every invoice line, is a different engineering problem from counting events.

Zendesk ran the experiment in public. In August 2024 it launched automated resolutions at $1.50 committed and $2.00 pay as you go. On email and web forms, 72 hours of customer silence counted as a resolution. In May 2026 it rebuilt the meter into three tiers, and only a “Verified Resolution”, confirmed by a second model auditing the transcript, is billable.

What is the difference between output-based and outcome-based pricing?

An output is work the software completed, and it can compute and defend that itself. An outcome is a change in the customer’s business, like cash recovered, and it usually needs a third party such as a bank or card network to confirm it happened.

Is per-resolution pricing outcome-based?

No. A resolved ticket is an output. It is often the right thing to bill on because resolution has a programmatic boundary the software can log.

Do AI agents with per-resolution pricing still charge a platform fee?

Almost always. Intercom sells seats plus resolutions with a 50-outcome monthly minimum, and Sierra’s contracts carry a floor around $150,000 a year. Potio could not find a verified enterprise contract for an outcome-priced AI agent without a floor.

More on this: Outcome-Based Pricing: Why It Rarely Works in SaaS

Related terms

• Outcome-Based Pricing
• Inputs to Impact Chain

Also called: per-resolution pricing, pay per output, per-output pricing.

Updated 29 September 2026