Buying outcomes instead of seats: how Agent-as-a-Service is priced
Agent-as-a-Service sells completed work rather than access to a tool. The vendor carries delivery risk, which changes what has to be true underneath: reliability becomes a design property, verification becomes a step in the graph, and the price refers to an outcome the buyer can check.
Three pricing models, one real difference
A seat licence prices access and leaves the buyer carrying every risk of whether the tool gets used well. Consumption pricing prices compute and moves reliability risk onto the buyer in a subtler way — you pay for the retries. Agent-as-a-Service prices the completed work, which means the vendor absorbs the cost of getting it wrong.
That third model is the only one where the seller's incentive and the buyer's outcome point the same direction, and it is the reason the category is worth naming separately.
What it demands of the system
Selling outcomes is only sane if reliability is engineered rather than hoped for. Chains — a fixed sequence of steps — fail badly, because one bad step propagates to the end unchecked. Graph topologies, where work branches, runs in parallel, verifies itself and converges, are harder to build and far more robust.
That difference is what makes verification a node rather than a wish, escalation to a human a node rather than an exception, and a confidence threshold something that can gate an edge. Reliability as a design property is the precondition for underwriting an outcome, and therefore the precondition for the pricing model.
What to ask a vendor
Whether they price the tool or the work. What they refund when the work is wrong. Where verification sits in their graph, and whether a human gate exists on the actions that would be expensive to get wrong. An agent vendor with no answer to the last one is selling a seat licence with better marketing.