This reframes everything. Customer success means revenue success. Platform improvements mean better monetization tools. Growth means more builders making more money.
LOL.
Companies want their revenue numbers to "line go up" and if that means success for the customers, that's a nice side-effect. It is absolutely not the goal, however.
Paying for outcomes is a nice idea but you can make WAY MORE MONEY selling picks and shovels to people who you know will never strike gold. (Plus, you can have a nice little side-hustle selling them maps of where treasure might be).
"Oh man, you're so close! If only you weren't out of tokens. Too bad you settled for the 20 dollar plan instead of the 200. One more prompt would do it, then everything would work perfectly"
Like where does that end?
To be viable as a business plan, this requires that a certain percentage of your customers have viable products.
Here’s the thing though: anyone who has a high volume of sales will want to shed the royalty. This could be by negotiating different terms or just rewriting to avoid the component or service that wants the royalty.
For Unity and Unreal, it’s pretty common knowledge that AAA studios have separately negotiated licenses, presumably to reduce or eliminate the per-unit royalty. Some studios write their own engine, though that has its own costs.
For vibe coding I have real doubts about this model. There’s effectively no moat and no defensive IP (ie: patents), so anyone making enough revenue to pay $$$ on royalties will probably end hiring SWEs to rewrite their software to avoid royalties.
