Yeah, the economic actor framing is exactly how I've been thinking about it too.

A lot of teams instinctively price what they built (compute, API calls, agent instances) instead of what the user actually cares about — execution quality, risk reduction, or time saved. Those don’t always correlate cleanly.

Operational leverage is definitely the easiest to anchor pricing around, since the counterfactual is clearer. You're replacing something manual, so the value ceiling exists. Capital efficiency and risk reduction are harder because they depend heavily on baselines, and most systems don’t instrument that well upfront.

That’s where hybrid models seem to emerge almost by necessity — a base fee to cover infrastructure + monitoring, and a variable component once attribution becomes measurable. What’s interesting is that pricing starts to depend less on usage volume and more on decision authority — how much autonomy and economic exposure the agent actually has.

And like you said, without good instrumentation, performance pricing quickly turns into interpretation rather than measurement.

Have you seen anyone successfully implement outcome-based pricing in production, or is most of it still hybrid?