Do you turn off credits when outcome pricing goes live?

No. Hybrid pricing goes live for new customers in quarter two and the credit keeps selling the general-purpose work for the whole migration. The outcome tier prices one thing, the outcome the customer was already counting before the vendor existed. Turning both switches on the same day is the version that puts a company out of business.

How deep is the gross margin trough?

The playbook's curve goes from 80% to 65 to 68% in quarter three, bottoms at 58 to 62% in quarter four, recovers toward 65% in quarter five, and is back above 70% in quarter six. My actual migration recovered to 71% by month 22. The CFO conversation about that curve happens in quarter one, and the board sees three slides on it every quarter for 24 months.

What does the dispute queue look like?

Ours used a 48-hour definition of resolved. It held for 98% of cases. The other 2% became more than 200 contested cases a week, disputes ran at 600 a week against 50 projected, and the internal dispute team grew from 4 analysts to 9. That queue is the one part of the road that credits do not avoid, because a credit with an unpublished burn rate produces the same argument about a different line on the invoice.

How Long Does Moving to Outcome Pricing Take?

How long does moving from credits to outcome pricing take?

THE SHORT ANSWER

Plan on six quarters, and do not switch. In the migration I ran at a $40M ARR SaaS it was 21 months from the decision to the day the per-seat tier sunset, and 22 months until outcome revenue reached 91% of the total with blended gross margin back at 71%. The playbook runs hybrid pricing for new customers from quarter two while credits keep selling the general-purpose work, migrates the top 20 accounts in quarter three, bottoms out at 58 to 62% gross margin in quarter four, and sunsets the legacy tier in quarter six. The dispute queue is sized before the first invoice: our definition held for 98% of cases and the other 2% was 200 contested cases a week.

Elena Verna's October 16 post says what most credit-based AI companies say in private: outcome pricing is right in theory, and Lovable would not be in business by the time it got there. The useful answer to that is a duration and a curve, not an argument, and I have both from a migration I finished.

The number people miss is that nobody switches. The credit keeps selling the general-purpose work, where Verna is right that the unit is unknown, and the outcome tier prices the one thing the customer already counted. For a support agent that is a resolved ticket. The definition held for 98% of my cases because help desks had been counting resolutions for twenty years before an agent touched one.

The quarter-by-quarter table, the five things that broke on sunset day, and why the dispute queue is not a reason to wait are in Lovable Isn't Ready for Outcome Pricing. Here Is the 21-Month Bill.. The after-action numbers are in Field Report: What Broke When We Killed Our Per-Seat Tier, and the operating schedule is Pricing Migration: The 18-Month Quarterly Playbook.

Last reviewed 2026-10-16 · 1 min read

How long does moving from credits to outcome pricing take?

SOURCES

THE LONG VERSION

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