Paygent Tracks the Hidden Computing Costs of AI Agents as the Shift to Outcome-Based Pricing Creates

In 2025, Aditya Sonkar and Prakash Kushwaha watched major software companies struggle to monetize the new wave of AI Agents. Large firms cycled through multiple pricing models in an attempt to charge for digital labor. Seeing a critical infrastructure gap, the founders launched Paygent to solve it.

😟 Problem

The rise of autonomous software breaks traditional seat-based subscription models. Faster AI agents complete tasks in less time with minimal human supervision, shrinking revenue for companies that charge per user or per minute. An estimated 37% of AI Startups operate with a structural imbalance between cost and price. Unpredictable Token Consumption often causes infrastructure costs to spike tenfold in production. Developers risk billing a customer $100foranoutcomethatsilentlyconsumes$120 in backend compute.

💡 Solution

Paygent operates as a financial command center for AI Development, helping companies transition from ACTivity tracking to outcome-based revenue models. Core features include:

• Cost tracking: Measures real-time third-party API expenses to prevent margin leakage.

• Outcome billing: Shifts monetization from subscriptions toward invoicing for completed digital tasks.

• Value benchmarking: Compares automated workflow costs agAInst human-equivalent salaries in specific geographic markets.

• Automated collections: Manages invoice generation and payment processing upon task completion.

📊 Market Size

The company identifies a serviceable obtainable market of $925 million, with an initial focus on Tier 2 scaling AI startups as its beachhead customer segment.

🤝 Team

• Aditya Sonkar, Co-founder. Brings a decade of startup experience and previously scaled RevMeUp, a social commerce platform, to over 100,000 users.

• Prakash Kushwaha, Co-founder. Has nine years of engineering leadership experience and previously co-founded AgroWave, an agritech supply chain startup connecting fArmers with retailers.

• Nihal Dwivedi, Founding Engineer. Focuses on building the company’s infrastructure and product systems.

🚀 Traction

Paygent currently manages 11 active pilots, with two already deployed in production environments. Early users report margin improvements of 15% to 20% after identifying inefficient background resources. The team has secured 12 letters of intent from an initial pipeline of 500 target profiles.

🏆 competition

Traditional platforms like Stripe and Chargebee handle fixed subscriptions effectively but struggle with high-frequency computing costs. Modern usage-based tools like Orb and Metronome track high-volume metering without offering visibility into underlying model margins. Paygent differentiates itself with an evaluation Framework proxy that tracks real-time gross margins per Agent. The platform calculates human-equivalent costs, giving founders data-driven pricing leveRAGe against traditional labor markets.

💰 Financials

The business monetizes through a transparent SaaS model across three pricing tiers: a free plan, a Starter plan at $399permonth,andaGrowthplanat$799 per month. Enterprise customers pay a 1% platform fee on total revenue managed by the software. Paygent secured $125,000inpre-seedfundingfromAntlerinDecember2025andplanstoraiseanadditional$2 million in the near future.

🚩 Risks

• Paygent’s 1% platform fee on managed revenue is misaligned with its current headline value of improving margins by 15% to 20% through waste identification. Research indicates that as cloud cost discipline matures, teams tend to formalize and bring optimization practices in-house, increasing the likelihood they will resist or replace an external take rate.

• The product depends on companies shifting from seat-based or activity-based pricing to outcome billing, with invoices and payments triggered immediately upon task completion. Research shows that even as AI drives new pricing models, buyer behavior and procurement processes often remain anchored to established APProaches, creating friction for outcome-based monetization.