Sunday Edition #12
The power of performance-based pricing.
Outcome-based pricing is reshaping AI monetization. Pioneered by Fin, this model is prompting a wider group of AI companies to move away from seats and credits toward “Pay when the AI actually does the job.”
What price is right?
This week, VP of Product,
, went on “Way of Product” to describe how building Fin forced Intercom to “break” its old operating model and align the entire company around one goal: increasing AI resolution rate.
Listen to the full interview above or view the TLDR snippet on LinkedIn.
Credits as a bridge, not the destination
Kyle Poyar listed the most disruptive AI pricing models, placing ours at #2.
His big takeaway on credit-based pricing is simple: generic AI credits track vendor costs, not customer value. The real win is charging on outcomes like resolutions, workflows automated, or revenue saved.
Poyar also highlights this as part of a broader shift from selling access to selling work, where the unit of pricing is a business outcome rather than infrastructure use.
Looking back to move forward
On Lenny’s Podcast, Eoghan McCabe talked about how Intercom’s old plans became “a meme” and “the most hated pricing in SaaS,” and why Fin’s new model had to pass a simple test: customers should be able to understand it in one sentence and feel it’s fair.
The before and after posts speak for themselves.
As Eoghan explains, Fin’s pricing is built around the idea that you pay only when the AI does the job a human agent would, which forces the product to earn its keep every time. By deliberately sacrificing revenue to reset pricing, we put a truly customer‑first product at the center of the business again.
Last week, Aisling O’Reilly touched on this in her Chargebee interview, explaining that the team was willing to risk meaningful near‑term ARR to replace complex pricing with a structure that is simple, transparent, and clearly tied to customer value.
“The reality is that the value Fin provides is often 10–25x in ROI for most customers.”
On the Intercom Blog, Aisling explains that resolutions are the clearest path to value because you only pay when AI actually solves a problem. Key takeaways:
✅ Resolutions is the right direction: but, buyers need help getting there, support, data, and transparency.
💰 Price still wins: great metrics won’t land if the price point doesn’t work.
🤝 Trust is the currency of AI: buyers need to trust the agent and the pricing model.
Fin’s value in practice
This approach is already driving real customer results, including new case studies from Rocket Money, Clay, and others. Rocket Money is seeing about a million dollars in annual ROI from Fin as it handles most customer conversations end to end—making outcome-based pricing a clear win.
Our parting thought
The pricing story that wins won’t be based on tokens. It’ll be the one that speaks in a customer’s own language of outcomes: tickets closed, hours saved, revenue protected, and experiences improved.
See you next Sunday.
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