I am Raj, founder of Valmi.
We were building AI agents and quickly hit a pricing problem.
Tokens, API calls, and seats made no sense for agents. One agent run might be cheap and useless; another might be expensive and replace hours of human work. Billing on usage felt disconnected from real value.
What customers actually asked was: “Did it finish the task?” “Did it resolve the ticket?”
That pushed us toward outcome-based billing - charge only when the agent delivers something meaningful.
But existing billing systems don’t handle this well:
outcomes aren’t first-class concepts costs vary per run (LLMs, tools, retries) it’s hard to see margins per agent or customer
So we built Valmi:
1. outcomes as billable units 2. cost + margin tracked per agent run 3. outcome, usage, or hybrid pricing 4. open-source SDKs, self-hostable stack
Outcome billing also builds trust: customers pay for results, not experiments.
Available on GitHub (https://github.com/valmi-io/value).
I also wrote my hypothesis here: https://www.valmi.io/blog/an-imperative-for-ai-agents-outcom...
Would love your feedback! Also hosted at https://value.valmi.io
-Raj
rajvarkala•1h ago
What do you think are the challenges with AI Agents pricing? How you are currently pricing your AI Agents work?
Would be great to know what HN community thinks.