Hi HN,
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
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