Nousu
AI Agents for E-commerce
When we started building in the e-commerce support space, every advisor told us: "Charge per ticket resolved." It’s the industry standard for AI support apps, and on paper, it sounds like easy MRR
6 months in, we realized why merchants secretly hate it: it’s a "growth tax." The better a merchant does, the more they get punished by their software stack. Worse, traditional AI chatbots were just wrapper-bots spitting out FAQ links, yet charging $0.50 per "resolution."
We decided to flip the model on https://nousu.chat/
1. The Business Shift: We moved to a flat monthly rate. To make the margins work on flat pricing, we had to eliminate heavy middleware (LangChain, vector DB subscription bloat) and rebuild our agent architecture from scratch on edge Workers and state machines
2. The Channel Problem: Most e-com brands lose sales because support over livechat is chaotic. Customers text in fragments ("cancel my order", "wait actually change address", "hello?"). Standard LLM pipelines race each other and break state
3. The Fix: We built KV-locks tied to the thread state to handle async message queues deterministically before executing API actions directly
Moving to flat-rate changed our conversations with merchants instantly, it turned support from an unpredictable cost into a fixed utility
For other founders here: Have you tried flat-fee pricing in a market dominated by usage billing? Did it help or hurt your conversion?
3 Comments
I'm curious what convinced you merchants were really buying predictable economics rather than lower overall cost.
From the conversations you've had since switching, do prospects spend more time discussing the flat-rate pricing itself, or does removing usage anxiety simply make them evaluate the product on its actual capabilities?
What convinced us was watching merchants literally turn off support features during high-volume periods (like BFCM) out of fear of a surprise bill. They were actively degrading their customer experience to cap variable costs
When your pricing is per-ticket, every support request feels like a penalty on growth. Removing that variable cap wasn't just about being cheaper, it aligned our incentives with theirs. Merchants don't mind paying predictable software bills, they just hate being taxed for scale. We still offer tiered plans, but they align with a merchant's growth phase rather than punishing them for ticket spikes
This also completely shifted the sales dynamic. When you charge per ticket, the first 20 minutes of every call is the prospect trying to calculate edge cases: "What counts as a resolved ticket? What if a customer sends 5 follow-up emails? What if an automation triggers by accident?" That's usage anxiety in real time
Once you remove that friction, the conversation immediately pivots to actual capabilities: "Can your agent actually execute actions in my Shopify without hallucinating, and what's the real resolution rate?"
Really appreciate you taking the time to explain that. I'd enjoy continuing the conversation after I've had a chance to explore the product a bit. What's the best email to reach you on?