Pay for the Outcome

For a long time software was priced by the seat: how many people use it. Once AI began taking on the work itself, counting seats started to lose its meaning. In 2023 Intercom began selling at $0.99 per resolved enquiry. In October 2024 Salesforce offered $2 per conversation — and then, in the honest and interesting part, rebuilt the whole thing within a year after complaints that «a conversation» was too vague to count (May 2025, ten cents per action). New shapes of pricing do not settle on the first try either. This map reads the model as the mouth of one long river. In 1923 Claude Hopkins wrote that advertising must be countable. In 1998 Bill Gross built «pay only when it is clicked». And in 2023 came «pay only when it is solved». A hundred-year wish — to pay only for what worked — reaching software itself. No published source argues this lineage, so the map draws it as a thin line of its own reading. The difficulties arrive in the same shape. Who decides that it was solved? A conversation can close technically while the person returns three days later, more stuck than before. And the party measuring the outcome is the party selling it.