Paying for automation on results: how value tracking works
Most software charges you the same whether it transforms your business or sits unused. Value-based pricing flips that: a modest setup fee, then a share of the value the system measurably creates. It only works if the measuring is honest. Here is how the mechanics actually run.
The problem with paying everything upfront
The traditional deal in business software puts all the risk on you. You pay the licence or the build cost first, and only later discover whether the thing delivers. If it does not, the vendor has been paid and you have a receipt and a lesson. This is why so many trade firms have a graveyard of subscriptions: the incentive to make the software actually work ended at the invoice.
Value-based pricing restructures the deal. At AGMM the model is an onboarding fee of £2,000 to £10,000 depending on scope, which covers the real cost of the analysis, build, integration and training, and then ten percent of the value the system creates, measured in your own CRM. The installer's upside is tied to your outcome. If the system creates nothing, ten percent of nothing is nothing.
What counts as value: the four categories
Value is a slippery word, so it has to be pinned down before anything is signed. The quantified business case produced in the three to seven day analysis after the discovery call defines exactly what will be counted, in four categories:
| Category | What it means | Example measure |
|---|---|---|
| Time savings | Hours of admin removed from real people's weeks | Quote preparation drops from 4 hours to 40 minutes |
| Cost savings | Spend that stops: duplicate tools, rework, outsourced admin | Three overlapping subscriptions cancelled |
| Capacity gains | More work handled with the same team | Quotes sent per month rises with no new hires |
| Revenue opportunities | Money that was leaking and now is not | Enquiries answered same day instead of lost |
Each category gets a baseline, a method of measurement, and an agreed conversion to pounds. That last part matters: an hour saved is only worth something if you agree what an hour costs before the clock starts, not after.
Why the tracking lives in your CRM, not theirs
This is the detail that keeps the whole model honest. The value numbers are tracked inside the client's own CRM, the system you own, can open at any time, and could lock the installer out of tomorrow. There is no proprietary dashboard doing arithmetic you cannot inspect. Every quote counted, every enquiry logged, every hour saved is a record in your database.
That has three consequences. First, you can audit the sums whenever you like. Second, the data outlives the relationship: if you part ways, your history stays with you. Third, it forces the installer to build proper integration with your CRM in week three of the install, because their own invoice depends on it working. Incentives do more than promises. If your firm does not have a CRM worth the name yet, that gap gets addressed during onboarding; our piece on whether a builder actually needs a CRM covers the basics.
What keeps the model honest
Value-based pricing can be gamed in both directions, so the guardrails matter:
- Baselines are agreed before go-live. You cannot measure improvement without an honest starting point, which is why the analysis phase exists.
- Attribution is conservative. If your revenue rises because the market picked up, that is not the system's doing. Only changes traceable to the installed processes count.
- Categories are capped by definition. An hour saved is valued at an agreed rate, not at whatever makes the invoice bigger.
- The month three optimisation review cuts both ways. It exists to find underperformance as well as wins. If a workflow is not delivering, it gets fixed or switched off.
The result is a fee that tracks reality with a lag, reviewed by a client who holds the data. It is not a perfect mechanism, no pricing is, but it is far harder to fudge than a licence fee justified by a features list, and it is the reason a serious analysis will sometimes conclude that a firm should not buy at all. That is the same honesty we apply when we say the free tool has limits, as in how accurate is AI quoting, honestly.
Where the setup fee fits
Why not make it entirely results-based with no setup fee? Because a real installation consumes real weeks: onboarding in week one, build in week two, integration in week three, testing and training in week four. A provider who charges nothing upfront must recover those costs somewhere, usually through inflated value claims later or by cutting the analysis short. The £2,000 to £10,000 onboarding fee, scaled to scope, covers the work actually done, and the ten percent covers the outcome. Costs are paid as costs, results are paid as results. You can see the full timeline and pricing on the QS Quoter Commercial page.
See what the numbers would say for your firm
A sixty minute discovery call, then a three to seven day analysis with a quantified business case across time, cost, capacity and revenue. If the value is not there, the case will say so.
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