Essay

When Delivery Costs Hit Zero, the Market Goes Outcome-Based (Rev-Share)

July 3, 20266 min read

Short answer: AI is driving the marginal cost of delivery toward zero. When producing the deliverable is nearly free, charging for it stops making sense — the value moves to distribution, positioning, and rare expertise. The natural pricing model for that world is outcome-based: revenue share, not upfront fees. I think the market goes majority outcome-based within two years. Act accordingly.

Your cost of delivery is collapsing

Look at what's already true. Want McKinsey-level reports? Done. Want to build the next Microsoft-grade product? Done. Want to automate your marketing? Done. AI is getting so good that, for a growing share of work, you have almost no delivery cost at all.

That's the premise everything else follows from. The expensive part of most services was always the human hours to produce the output. As AI absorbs those hours, the cost of the deliverable itself trends to zero.

So what's left to be valuable?

Not delivery. What remains scarce is everything around it: marketing, sales, positioning, and acquiring the resources beyond AI — the rare data, the distribution, the expertise that isn't commoditized yet. That's the new bottleneck, and that's where the next wave of value capture happens.

People will keep finding new ways to leverage AI using data and expertise few others have. The question is how that gets priced.

Why this forces outcome-based pricing

Here's the mechanism. If the cost to lend you a capability — or to build it out for you — is so cheap that the provider doesn't need to charge upfront, then upfront pricing becomes the worst option for both sides. The provider caps their upside; you take on risk for something unproven.

Revenue share fixes both. The provider lends the capability cheaply now and captures far more on the back end if the outcome is good. You pay nothing upfront and only pay when value actually materializes. When delivery is free, outcome-based pricing is simply the better deal for everyone — which is why it wins.

This is why I started collaborating on rev-share

This isn't a forecast I'm watching from the sidelines — it's why I moved my own work to revenue share. When your delivery cost is near zero, charging upfront leaves money and alignment on the table. Revenue-share collaborations let people contribute rare capabilities cheaply and share in the outcome, and everyone ends up better off.

The infrastructure to do it is the missing piece, and it's what Ordana provides: AI matching across nearly 100 startups with an estimated $475K of total resources, signed contracts, and automatic revenue splits through Stripe — an outcome-based deal set up in about 15 minutes instead of negotiated for weeks.

The takeaway

Delivery is becoming free; distribution and expertise are not. The market will reprice around that — away from upfront fees and toward outcome-based revenue share — and I'd bet it's majority there within two years. The founders and operators who set up for it now will be the ones it rewards.

Related reading:

Set up an outcome-based collaboration on Ordana → Free to join — pay only when revenue flows.