Intercom publishes a price of $0.99 per outcome for Fin, its software that answers customer support questions. The money changes hands when an outcome happens, and Intercom’s pricing page sets out the conditions that make one count.
That is a provider selling a finished piece of work rather than access to a tool. The name for that shape is service as software.
What does service as software mean?
Service as software means you buy a finished piece of work instead of a tool your own people have to operate. Responsibility for the result sits with the provider. An accountant has always worked that way, so the purchase itself is old. What is new is that software now does more of the execution, so more kinds of work get sold like this.
Foundation Capital, a venture firm, described the idea in April 2024:
“In the software business, a company may sell access to its platform or tool, but customers are still responsible for using that tool to achieve the desired outcome. In the services business, responsibility for achieving the desired outcome sits with the company selling the service.”
Two words travel with the idea into sales calls, and both are worth translating before you meet them:
- Copilot. Software that sits beside one of your people and makes them faster. Your team still does the job.
- Autopilot. Software that does the job and hands over the finished result. Julien Bek, a partner at Sequoia Capital, draws the line in one sentence: “A copilot sells the tool. An autopilot sells the work.”
Look at whose calendar the work lands on after you sign.
The six-to-one figure
Julien Bek of Sequoia Capital writes in his March 2026 essay “Services: The New Software” that “For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services,” which we take as his estimate. The essay gives no source for the figure.
The same essay carries an illustrative map of the industries where its author expects this to work. That map supplies no marketing example and no marketing measurement.
The three things a provider can sell you
Marketing work can be bought in three shapes, and they put the risk in three different places. The third shape is the one the new vocabulary is about, and its bill can be built two ways.
| What you pay for | What you get | What you carry | What the provider carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| A seat or a licence | Access to a tool | Doing the work, and whether it worked | Keeping the tool running |
| An hour or a day | Someone’s time | The final total, unless the hours are capped | Turning up |
| A fixed total for a named piece of work | That piece of work, finished | Describing it precisely enough to accept it | Delivering it for the agreed number |
| A price per counted result | Each result that meets the definition | The monthly total, which moves with the count | Making each counted result happen |
The two bottom rows look similar in a pitch and behave differently on an invoice. A fixed total gives you one number you can take to finance before any work starts. A price per result gives you a rate, and the total depends on how many results get counted, so ask for a binding spending limit in writing. An alert tells you the money is going; only a limit stops it.
Marketing work could be bought either way. A campaign page built and live is the shape of a fixed total. Leads qualified or pages published are the shape of a counted result. What they share is that you are buying the finished thing, which makes the definition of the finished thing the most important sentence in the contract. We wrote separately about why hourly billing works against the client, and this is the question that replaces it.
What “done” means when the vendor writes the definition
Intercom’s pricing page is the clearest public example of how a real definition reads. One outcome counts when any of these is true:
- “A customer confirms their issue is resolved”
- “They don’t ask for more help after Fin responds”
- “Fin completes a workflow (Procedure), including handoffs”
A “Procedure” is a set of steps you configure for the software to follow. Intercom’s own instructions for building one put that work on the customer: “You define the structure using Steps, extend Fin’s abilities with Tools, and shape its behavior with Guidance.” The pricing page also says “You’re only charged once per conversation, even if multiple questions are answered.”
Only the first of the three is the customer saying the problem is solved. The second counts a customer who went quiet, which may mean they were helped and may mean they gave up. The third counts a completed Procedure, and that completion can include a handoff to a person. All three are defensible, and all three are the vendor’s definition rather than yours.
That is the reason to ask what counts as done. A provider selling you qualified leads or published pages owes you the same level of detail, in writing, before the first invoice.
Who carries the risk, and who gets the reward
A provider paid per result carries the execution: the result has to happen for the charge to apply at all. Whether a second attempt is inside that price, and when payment falls due, are contract terms rather than properties of the billing unit, so agree both in writing. That is where the seller’s risk is real, and it is why the definition in the contract will be tight.
The reward moves the same way. When the provider’s software or setup gets better at the task, they do the work faster for the same money and keep the difference. We think that is the right way round. The side that decides how the work gets done should carry the cost of getting it wrong, and should keep the gain when it gets faster. A provider who describes only the risk half is leaving out the part that makes the model attractive to them.
Six questions for a provider who sells work done
- What exactly counts as done, in writing? A good answer reads like a test you could run. “The page is live on your domain, the form submits into your CRM, and the tracking fires on the thank-you page” can be checked. “A high-performing landing page” cannot.
- What is the most this can cost me in a month? If the price is per result, ask for a binding spending limit and get the number in the contract. Ask for alerts as well, and treat them as a warning rather than a ceiling.
- Who approves publication, and what are they allowed to stop? Ask for a name and a role rather than a process diagram. If software does the work, a person still has to approve what goes live, and that person needs the authority to hold something back.
- What happens when a result does not land? Ask for the consequence in writing: redone inside the price, or not charged. Ask when payment falls due as well, because a result billed in advance is a different arrangement from one billed on delivery.
- What do we keep if you stop working with us? Ask where the setup lives, whose accounts own it, and who on your team has been shown how it runs. Put the access you keep in the contract, because paying for a finished result does not by itself leave you able to run it.
- Which decisions stay with us? Name them in the contract: positioning, pricing, brand voice and anything with legal exposure. Written down, they are yours to decide rather than something to argue about later.
When buying finished work is the wrong shape
Buying finished work needs a result somebody can describe before anyone starts. Here are three cases where it cannot be described yet, and where paying for a discovery stage or for time until it can serves you better.
- The result depends on your judgement and taste. Brand positioning, a pricing page that has to survive a board discussion, anything where the right answer is a decision. Nobody can carry that outcome for you, and a contract that pretends otherwise just relocates an argument.
- The result cannot be written in a sentence both sides would sign. “More awareness” and “better engagement” are directions rather than deliverables. If the definition keeps growing qualifiers while you draft it, there is nothing there yet to buy.
- The knowledge has to live inside your team. When the thing changes weekly and your own people will keep changing it, the handover matters more than the delivery. We wrote about the half of this work a marketing team can do itself and the half that needs an engineer, and the split applies here too.
Get the definition of done in writing, ask for a binding spending limit if the price is per result, and find out who approves publication before you sign anything.
Essential Code works this way too: you pay for the work done rather than for hours, and a small senior team builds each change and checks it before it goes live.
Sources
- Julien Bek, “Services: The New Software”, Sequoia Capital, 5 March 2026. https://sequoiacap.com/article/services-the-new-software/ (“For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services.”; “A copilot sells the tool. An autopilot sells the work.”; the illustrative map of ten industries, read in full.)
- Foundation Capital, 19 April 2024. https://foundationcapital.com/ideas/ai-leads-a-service-as-software-paradigm-shift (the quoted description of who is responsible for the outcome.)
- Intercom pricing page, read 15 October 2026. https://www.intercom.com/pricing (“$0.99 per outcome”, the three conditions quoted, and “You’re only charged once per conversation, even if multiple questions are answered.”)
- Intercom, “Building Fin Procedures”, read 15 October 2026. https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/13449439-building-fin-procedures (“You define the structure using Steps, extend Fin’s abilities with Tools, and shape its behavior with Guidance.”)