Amazon Web Services runs a huge marketplace where thousands of software companies sell to businesses that already use AWS cloud servers. The person who runs that marketplace, Ruba Borno, just gave a preview of where AWS wants software pricing to go, and it is a real shift for anyone who signs software contracts.
For years, most business software worked the same way. You sign a multiyear deal, agree on a number of users or seats, and pay roughly the same amount whether you use the tool heavily or barely touch it. AWS is now telling its partners, the companies that sell software through its marketplace, that this model is dying.
The replacement is pricing tied to actual use, or better, tied to actual results. Allison Johnson, who oversees around 400 of these technology partners at AWS, says customers no longer want to buy a three-year deal for ten thousand users when they could instead pay for what a hundred people actually use over six months.
Support software maker Zendesk has already rebuilt its pricing around this idea: customers now pay per support ticket the AI resolves, at roughly one to two dollars per ticket, instead of paying a flat fee per staff seat regardless of how many tickets get closed. Salesforce has done something similar with its own support agent, charging around two dollars only when an issue gets fully resolved without a human.
AWS backs this trend with its own data. It cites a 2026 market study finding that eighty percent of customers are shifting toward pricing tied to outcomes rather than licenses. AWS is also putting money behind the push, launching a program in June that offers partners up to fifty thousand dollars in marketing funds through 2027 if they can prove their AI tools deliver measurable customer results.
Here is the part worth sitting with. A separate and much larger study by Accenture, covering six thousand executives and employees, found that only about a quarter of companies can show real, lasting value from their AI spending, and that number actually dropped over the past few months rather than climbed.
That gap is exactly why this pricing shift matters for anyone who buys business software, not just tech buyers. Outcome-based pricing sounds like a win for the customer: you only pay when something actually works. But someone still has to define what "resolved" or "success" means in the contract, and vendors have every incentive to pick a generous definition.
The smart move for any procurement team right now is to push for outcome definitions that match what your business actually cares about, in writing, before signing anything new. AWS internally backs this shift too: Borno's own marketplace engineering team now ships work 88% faster after handing routine coding and incident response to AI, which is the proof point AWS is using to convince partners the change is worth making.