pricing "AI employees" is messing with my head. some notes after a couple months trying to sell this stuff
ok so I've been trying to sell OpenClaw agents to small businesses (law firms, real estate, that kind of thing) for a couple months now. building the agent part is honestly the easy bit at this point. pricing it is what's been keeping me up.
random notes, not super organized, just what I've actually run into:
per-seat pricing is dumb for this. tried it first bc that's what I know from SaaS. but nobody buying an agent cares how many "agents" you spun up, they care if their invoices go out faster. pricing per agent makes the client think about YOUR architecture instead of THEIR problem. bad idea.
what worked way better: call it an "AI employee" and charge monthly like a salary. not because it's technically accurate but because business owners already have a mental model for "what does a person cost me." suddenly you're not competing with a software subscription in their head, you're competing with hiring someone. much easier fight to win.
also — cost-plus pricing is a trap and I fell into it immediately. my first instinct was tokens cost X, compute costs Y, slap on margin, done. but like. if the thing you're selling stops a law firm from losing half a million euros they didn't even know they were losing, charging 1k/month bc that's your token cost + margin is just leaving money on the table AND making the client think of it as "a tool" instead of "the thing that found me money." find the number that shows what the problem is costing THEM (bonus if it's literally in their own reports) and price under that, not anywhere near your actual cost. feels weird the first time. isn't wrong though.
thing nobody talks about enough: if you're riding on someone else's subscription-tier LLM plan, you don't actually control your own costs. access, rate limits, which tier third party apps can even use — all of that can get yanked with zero warning. seen it happen. so now I bill the LLM usage separately as a pass-through, not bundled into my fee. slightly uglier as a single price tag but means I don't wake up one day with my margins gone because someone else changed a policy.
setup fee + monthly retainer > pure monthly. was scared the setup fee would scare people off. opposite happened — it filters out the tire kickers who just want to "try it" and ghost. and it pays for the part that's actually bespoke, bc every client's tools/workflows are different, there's no universal setup.
discounts for commitment work but HOW you frame it matters more than the actual %. saying "12 month commitment, 5% off, totally your call" converts way better than making the discounted price the default and the flexible price look like a penalty. same numbers. different vibe. people respond to the vibe.
biggest thing though — the objection is never the price. not once. it's always trust. will this thing hallucinate into a client's inbox, will it leak something it shouldn't. security isn't something you price, it's something you have to kill as a doubt before you even get to numbers. I lead with that now, before I show a single euro.
anyway. still figuring this out as I go. anyone here doing outcome-based pricing instead of flat fee, like a % of whatever it recovers/saves? been tempted but can't figure out how to measure it without turning every client into an audit project