Protum Releases VBP-AI 1.0: a Free Open-Source Standard for Pricing AI by Outcomes, Not Compute

SINGAPORE - June 16, 2026 - PRLog -- Protum today released version 1.0 of the Value-Based Pricing for AI (VBP-AI) Framework, a free, open-source procurement standard that helps enterprises pay for the economic value an AI system delivers rather than the computational effort it consumes. The framework is vendor-agnostic and available to any organisation under the MIT open-source licence at https://github.com/ProtumAI/vbp-ai-framework.

Software pricing is shifting under the weight of AI. Per-seat licensing is weakening because AI reduces the human hours a task requires, and many AI vendors have moved to token-consumption billing, which charges the buyer for raw compute whether or not the output is correct. Under that model, an organisation pays the same for a verified answer and a confidently fabricated one.

VBP-AI applies a test that enterprises already use with human suppliers. If a consultant gave a board fabricated numbers, the invoice would not be paid. The framework brings that accountability to AI contracts and shifts financial risk back toward the party that controls model quality.

The framework gives sourcing, legal, and technology teams four practical components:

• Three outcome-based billing models, ranging from a fee per successfully completed task, to a fee per verified business resolution, to a share of the cost savings or revenue an AI system generates.
• Three ready-to-use contract clauses to paste into a Master Services Agreement or RFP: no charge for fabricated outputs (intrinsic hallucinations), no charge when an AI agent correctly declines to answer for lack of grounded data, and no charge for the internal reasoning tokens a model generates before producing a final answer.
• An automated "judge gateway" that scores every AI response for factual consistency against its source before the response can be billed. Outputs that meet the agreed accuracy baseline are passed and billable; those that fall below it are blocked and zero-rated.
• A phased sourcing playbook that guides procurement teams through auditing vendors, inserting the clauses into RFPs, deploying the gateway, and reconciling invoices each month.

The VBP-AI Framework 1.0 is available now at https://github.com/ProtumAI/vbp-ai-framework and https://protum.ai/vbp.