Why we intend to bill per verified booking

The rule we're designing around: three conditions or it isn't billed

The intended rule is that a booking becomes billable only when all three conditions hold: we sent a message to a contact, that contact engaged, and a booking for that same contact appeared in the CRM inside a defined window. Deterministic matching — we knew exactly who we contacted, so we can check whether that exact person booked. No probabilistic attribution, no "brand lift," no grading rubric we control.

Bookings that land in the window without a tracked engagement would be labeled influenced: reported for visibility, never billed. Cancellations inside a grace window are meant to release the charge without the customer having to ask, and disputes are meant to be read as evidence that the rules are wrong rather than that the customer is difficult.

We are deliberately not publishing a target dispute rate. There is no billing system, no campaign has ever run, and a threshold quoted before the first invoice would be a number we made up. When there is real data, that is worth its own post.

Why not pure performance? Why not pure flat?

Pure pay-per-result sounds cleaner but requires so much settlement trust that it collapses into sales calls and contract negotiations — the opposite of self-serve. Pure flat fees are simple but put all the risk on the customer: the vendor gets paid whether anything books or not.

Subscription-plus-meter is the honest middle. The flat part covers infrastructure that runs regardless; the meter only moves when a verified job lands on the calendar. The incentives point the same direction, which is the entire argument.

Why publish pricing before it exists

Because pricing written down before launch is a constraint, and pricing invented after launch is a negotiation. Publishing the rule while we still have to build to it is the cheapest form of accountability available to us.

If the shipped model differs from this post, that difference will be visible and we will owe an explanation for it. That is the point.