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July 22, 2026

Product

Ten Times the Usage: The Case for Pricing Jinso on Outcomes, Not Licenses

Global6 min read·By: Jinso Labs

Jinso now offers outcomes-based contract terms, scoped to a pilot, for institutions that want their pricing tied to whether the tool actually gets used and works — not just to a license count. The decision to build that into our contracting model traces directly back to a March report from Digital Promise and the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, and the data in it is worth walking through in full, because it's the clearest evidence yet that paying for licenses instead of outcomes has been the wrong default for institutional edtech all along.

Districts buy edtech tools on faith more often than anyone likes to admit. A license gets purchased, a rollout gets scheduled, and the contract itself says nothing about whether the tool actually gets used, let alone whether it moves any outcome the district cared about when it signed. That's the default model most institutions are still operating under, and it's the model the Digital Promise report was built to test against something different.

What the Report Found

The report followed the first cohort of districts to procure edtech under outcomes-based contracting (OBC) — a model where payment terms are tied, at least partly, to whether agreed-upon student outcome benchmarks actually get hit. It's not a theoretical framework. Digital Promise engaged directly with the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting to study what actually happened once real districts put real money behind real outcome benchmarks, and tracked the results across the full first cohort to use the model.

  • Participating districts saw usage rates ten times higher than what Digital Promise typically sees under traditional contracts
  • Dosage requirements were met by 50 to 95% of students across the cohort
  • The industry baseline the report cites, drawn from prior research on edtech licensing: more than 65% of purchased edtech licenses go unused entirely

The gap between those numbers isn't subtle, and it isn't explained by the tools themselves being better under OBC than they were under traditional contracts. It's the same technology, purchased through the same kind of procurement office, deployed in the same classrooms. What changed was whether anyone had a reason to check if it was working while there was still time to fix it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A district that buys a flat-license tool finds out it isn't being used the way it was supposed to be used, if it finds out at all, at the point of renewal — after a full year of the license sitting mostly idle. A district under an outcomes-based contract finds out in week three, because the whole point of the arrangement is that both sides are watching the same usage data as it accumulates, not reconstructing it from an end-of-year report neither side has strong incentive to produce accurately.

Why the Payment Structure Changes Behavior

Traditional edtech procurement, as the report describes it, runs on a one-way relationship: a district buys, a vendor delivers, and nobody has strong incentive to check in until renewal time. OBC restructures that into something closer to a shared bet — district and provider teams have to agree on what success looks like, build an implementation plan around hitting it, and then actually watch the data together while the contract is live. One district leader in the cohort described the shift plainly: the mindset moved from fifty prescriptive requirements to a handful of goals that actually mattered.

That's a real change in what a contract is for. Most institutional buyers treat a contract as the finish line of a procurement process — the thing that gets signed once the negotiating is done. OBC treats the contract as the starting point of an ongoing relationship where both sides have to keep proving the tool is doing what it was bought to do. Fresno Unified School District, one of the districts experimenting with the model, found that outcomes-based terms led to regular data-driven check-ins with its provider rather than a single implementation call at the start of the year and silence after that.

The report calls this out as a structural shift, not a side effect: districts and school teams moved toward continuously monitoring and leveraging usage data for ongoing improvement, rather than treating data review as something that happens once a semester, if it happens at all. Providers benefited from the same shift in the other direction — closer contact with real classroom use gave several of them a clearer picture of how their own products actually got used, not just how they were designed to be used, which fed back into product decisions that had nothing to do with the contract itself.

This is the logic behind the shift: if an institution can't verify that a tool is actually being used, and used at a level that plausibly connects to the outcome it was purchased to move, the license fee is a bet made on trust rather than evidence. Outcomes-based terms don't eliminate that bet, but they force everyone to define what winning it looks like before the money changes hands, and they keep both sides checking the score while the game is still on.

Why This Matters for Skeptical Buyers

The report's finding matters most for a specific kind of institutional buyer: the ministry or university system that's already skeptical of edtech spending because too much of it has produced license counts instead of learning gains. That skepticism is earned. Billions have moved through institutional edtech budgets over the past several years, and the honest accounting on most of that spending is a stack of usage dashboards nobody reviewed and renewal decisions made on relationship, not evidence.

The Digital Promise cohort's 10x usage gap is direct evidence that the skepticism is aimed at the right target — not the tools themselves, but a procurement structure that never required anyone to prove the tools were working. A ministry that has been burned by that pattern before doesn't need a better sales pitch from its next vendor. It needs a contract structure where the vendor's payment is exposed to the same uncertainty the institution has been absorbing alone.

What This Looks Like in a Government Contract

It also reframes what "outcomes" should mean in a government contract. MESCYT's Presidential Bilingualism Initiative in the Dominican Republic, the government program Jinso has been running with the Ministry of Higher Education since the pilot began, didn't launch and then get left alone until a renewal date. An independent evaluation partway through the rollout is what drove the decision to recommend mandatory expansion across all 13 participating institutions, with enrollment scaling from an initial cohort toward a 50,000-student target because the data supported it.

That's the same underlying logic the OBC cohort is demonstrating at the district level, just operating at national scale and with higher stakes: when outcome data is visible during implementation rather than reconstructed after the fact, institutions can make expansion decisions based on what's actually happening instead of what a vendor promised at the pitch meeting. A ministry weighing whether to expand a program from 13 institutions to 50 doesn't have the luxury of waiting for a multi-year study to confirm the bet before committing more budget and more classrooms to it. It needs the same thing the OBC cohort's districts needed: a way to see the outcome moving before the full commitment is made, not just after.

What Jinso Is Betting On

The institutions that get the most out of this shift won't be the ones that simply add outcome language to next year's renewal. They'll be the ones that ask, before signing anything, whether they can actually see the data that would tell them if the outcome is being met — because a contract that promises accountability without the visibility to check it is still, underneath the new language, the same bet on faith it was designed to replace.

Pricing part of a Jinso pilot on outcomes means the same thing it means for any provider willing to do it: the risk moves onto us if the usage and results don't show up. That's a bet we're comfortable making because the institution doesn't have to take our word for it — engagement, assessment performance, where the gaps are, all shows up in the Institutional Copilot in real time, not in a report we hand over at the end of the contract.

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