The agency told us it would take 3 months. It took 9.

I've heard this story so many times I could finish it for you.

The founder signs a contract. Gets a kickoff call. Feels good about it. Then slowly, the updates get vague, the timelines shift, the invoices grow. Six months in, they're still "almost done."

And the worst part? The agency isn't even doing anything wrong. That's just how hourly billing works. Slow delivery is literally more profitable for them.

I kept thinking, there has to be a better way to structure this.

What if the team's incentive was to ship faster, not slower? What if you could just... subscribe to outcomes instead of hours?

We started experimenting with that internally. Small teams, locked scope, fixed monthly cost, AI tooling built into the workflow from day one, not bolted on at the end.

The first few runs were rough. But something clicked around the third or fourth engagement.

The team stopped thinking about time. They started thinking about what needed to be shipped by Friday.

It's still early, and there's a lot to figure out. But the results have been interesting enough that I think it's worth talking about openly.

Curious if anyone else has experimented with outcome-based dev models, what worked, what broke, what you'd do differently.