Launch HN: Skope (YC S25) – Outcome-based pricing for software products

Summary

Hi HN, we’re Ben and Connor, the co-founders of Skope (https://www.useskope.com/), a billing system that supports outcome-based pricing for software—that is, which charges your customers only when your software actually works. We’re an alternative to Stripe Billing, Orb, and Metronome that natively supports this pricing model, because we believe it’s especially needed for the AI products which are flooding the market and that will continue to be built in the future.Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORxhACQbu64Prior to working on Skope, we built AI agents that fundraised for nonprofits. We weren’t able to find our stride within the nonprofit world, one reason being that there was no incentive for a nonprofit (with an already small budget) to take on the risk of buying expensive software claiming to replace humans at a high upfront cost, without proving its value first.Instead, they should’ve been able to pay every time our product really worked (in this case by securing a donation or booking a meeting). With this model, we wouldn’t profit off of nonprofits with a mediocre product. At the same time, we’d give ourselves more upside if what we were selling truly did its job. All while taking all the risk off of our buyers.Although we really wanted to, there was no easy way to make this happen at scale. It would have had to rely on trust, and depend on every single customer reporting each outcome quickly and accurately. Not the best recipe.So, we decided to build it…which turned out to mean rebuilding billing from scratch. But we think a world where people pay for software doing its job is a good one, in which case outcome-based pricing will catch on, but don’t think it’ll happen overnight. There are a ton of wrinkles to figure out still. In the meantime, we’ve also built the rails to support traditional subscriptions and usage/credit based models with a focus on making iteration on price really easy.How it works: Our users can easily track customer us...