A Delivery Unit (DU) is AiDOOS's universal output-based pricing primitive. One $/DU rate per tier, calibrated against the DU Dictionary, refundable when unused. The measurement and pricing layer that makes outcome-based delivery structurally true.
A Delivery Unit is a standardized measure of cognitive output, calibrated against the AiDOOS DU Dictionary — a reference catalog of typical software, data, design, and integration work. Roughly 1 DU equals 4 hours of mid-level engineering output as a benchmark, but hours are a benchmark, not a billing unit.
A senior architect shipping 1 DU in 1 hour and a junior engineer shipping 1 DU in 8 hours both produce 1 DU. The customer pays the same. The DU primitive decouples customer pricing from time, technology, and seniority. Internally, AiDOOS computes a multi-factor calculation that captures technology, seniority, scarcity, and complexity — those factors are never published as line items. The customer sees one universal $/DU rate per tier; complex work consumes more DUs.
Hourly billing creates incentive misalignment — vendors profit when work takes longer. Story points are team-internal estimation units with no consistent cross-vendor meaning and no pricing attached. Fixed-bid milestones bundle scope estimation, vendor risk, and customer acceptance into a single number that breaks when scope shifts.
DUs unbundle. They are:
The result: pricing that aligns vendor and customer incentives. AiDOOS earns when work ships and is accepted, not when hours rack up.
| Unit | What it measures | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Hours | Time spent | Vendor profits when work takes longer; customer absorbs scope creep |
| Story Points | Team-internal complexity perception | No cross-vendor meaning; no pricing attached; recalibrated per team |
| Fixed-Bid Milestones | Lump-sum deliverables | Scope changes break the bundle and trigger contracting cycles |
| Per-FTE Months | Headcount × time | Pays for redundancy customer didn't ask for; punishes overstaffing |
| Delivery Units (DUs) | Calibrated cognitive output, accepted-shipped | — |
Milestones don't go away under DU pricing — they remain the acceptance gates that trigger DU consumption. They just stop doubling as pricing units. Story points still work for sprint planning if your team uses them. DUs are the customer-facing pricing layer, not a replacement for internal team rituals.
The DU Dictionary is the reference catalog AiDOOS uses to convert real-world work to Delivery Units. AI-assisted estimation matches a story description against the catalog; the calibration board adjudicates unusual cases; continuous learning from actual-vs-estimated outcomes refines the calibration over time.
The Dictionary is the platform's core IP and competitive moat. Competitors can copy the pricing page in a day; they cannot copy years of calibration data. Pre-flight estimation shows the customer the estimated DU count, the historical accuracy band of similar estimates, and the breakdown of what drove the size.
Individual stories are capped at ~20 DUs. Anything bigger must be decomposed. This caps DU inflation, keeps invoices predictable, and forces the discipline of breaking work into shippable units rather than letting "the integration project" become an opaque 200-DU blob.
| Tier | DUs | Price | $/DU | Validity | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 10 | $2,000 | $200 | 90 days | The $2K bet. Credit-card checkout, bypasses procurement. |
| Small ★ Most Popular | 60 | $10,000 | $167 | 6 months | Activation tier — most customers land here. |
| Scale | 250 | $40,000 | $160 | 12 months | Multi-team expansion. Best per-DU rate in self-serve flow. |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Below $140 | Custom | Strategic relationship. MSA, DPA, dedicated success. |
Project flow uses tier bands to determine the rate (1-30 DUs at Starter rate, 31-150 at Small, 151-499 at Scale, 500+ at Enterprise). Same dollar-per-DU at any given DU count whether you pre-purchase a pack or run an engagement-by-engagement Project. No "on-demand premium."
For the full pricing breakdown, see the pricing page. For the framework that normalizes DU pricing against hourly vendors apples-to-apples, see the Total Cost of Delivery framework.
Tell us what you want shipped. We'll size it in Delivery Units and put a Virtual Delivery Center pod against it in days. Refundable if you change your mind. Re-delivered if it doesn't pass acceptance.