I love my job, and creating real business value has always been the most important thing to me. That sentence sounds like marketing — so let me tell you what it cost to keep it true.
The mindset I’ve been fighting
I’ve spent decades in software, and for most of them I’ve been fighting the same mindset: designing systems to cram in as many fashionable technologies as possible.
It was almost painful to watch — developers planning overcomplicated features not because the client needed them, but because they wanted to try something new. Architecture decisions made for the résumé, not for the operation that would live with them. An entire industry culture optimizing for what’s interesting to build instead of what’s valuable to own.
The client’s actual goals — the reason any of us were being paid — somewhere down the list.
Pricing models made it worse
What amplifies that culture is how the work gets billed.
Hourly rates bill you for the journey, not the destination. The incentive is structural: the longer it takes, the more the vendor earns. Efficiency is a donation.
Fixed-price contracts lock you to the destination you signed for on day one — before either side had learned anything. Every discovery becomes a negotiation; by go-live, the system matches the contract, not your operation.
Notice what both models have in common: neither ties the vendor’s earnings to whether the software actually helps you. You can follow either contract perfectly and still deliver something useless. I’ve watched it happen. That’s what was painful.
The idea that matched
When I came across value-based pricing, it wasn’t a technique I adopted — it was a philosophy I recognized.
Instead of selling hours, I commit to a business outcome. We agree on the goal and the budget, and from that moment my success is tied directly to yours: the only way I do well is if the system does what your operation needs. Not “close enough.” Not “as specified in Appendix B.” What it needs.
That single change reorganizes everything downstream. Trendy technology loses its appeal when you’re paid for outcomes — proven tools that work for a decade suddenly look beautiful. Overcomplicated features stop being fun when their cost lands on your own side of the table. And the relationship stops being vendor-and-client and becomes what it should have been all along: two parties who win and lose together.
What it means on your side of the contract
You pay for exactly what your operation needs — not for hours with unclear results, not for a license to someone else’s vision of your business. Not for our mistakes, our rework, or a rewrite in three years. The budget is predictable; the details stay flexible as we both learn.
And the model doesn’t expire at launch. It applies to the initial build and to everything after — maintenance, new features, entirely new modules — and if anything, it matters more after go-live. That’s when most of a system’s lifetime cost actually accrues, and it’s when a typical vendor holds all the leverage: switching is expensive, so hourly maintenance quietly becomes captive billing. With value-based pricing the rule never changes, in year one or year ten: tangible benefit, or no charge — that’s what long-term responsibility looks like in practice ￫.
The mechanics of how that works — complexity-locked budgets, what changes cost and what changes don’t — are laid out here ￫ — this essay is just the why.
The honest ending
For me, it’s the only way to work. It demands more — real estimates, real architecture, a fee genuinely at risk — and it removes every excuse I could hide behind. That’s precisely what I like about it.
It lets me focus on the value I promised. And it’s how, after all these years, I can honestly say I still love my job.
If your incentives and your vendor’s have never pointed the same way
Start with numbers instead of promises: our free Operations Efficiency Map session calculates, stage by stage, what better software would be worth in your operation — before anyone talks price.