The Problem With Paying for Activity
When a city buys a service, the easiest thing to contract for is effort. A vendor agrees to fly a certain number of missions, deliver a certain number of images, or produce a certain number of reports. The invoice is tied to the work the vendor did - not to whether that work made anything better.
That model is comfortable for the vendor and risky for the city. If the vendor flies every flight on the schedule but the dumpsites keep piling up, the vendor still gets paid. The city has purchased motion, not progress.
We don't think that's the right way to do this. Illegal dumping isn't a problem that gets solved by more activity. It gets solved by the right work orders reaching the right crews at the right time - and by the ones that shouldn't exist never being created at all.
So we price for outcomes. Our fee is tied to what changes in the field, not to how busy we look. That means we share the risk with the city: if our data doesn't make cleanup faster, cheaper, and more complete, we haven't earned our keep.
Every Work Order Has a Price Tag
To price for outcomes, you first have to understand what an outcome actually costs. In public works, almost everything flows through one unit of currency: the work order. And not all work orders are the same. There are three kinds that matter, and each one carries a different cost to the city.
1. The Bad Work Order: Paying for Nothing
A bad work order is the most wasteful kind. It's a dispatch that produces no cleanup. The site was already cleared, or the report was a duplicate of one already in the queue, or the description didn't match reality - a "mattress" that turns out to be a refrigerator, so the crew arrives without the right equipment and has to come back.
On paper, the crew did work. In reality, the city paid roughly $200 for a truck to drive somewhere and accomplish nothing. Multiply that across a year of complaint-driven dispatch and it adds up to a meaningful chunk of a public works budget spent on motion that never turns into a cleaner street.
Our daily aerial detection is designed to shrink this category. Because we see the same sites day over day, we know what's already been cleaned, what's a duplicate, and what equipment a pile will actually require. That means fewer wasted rollouts - and every bad work order we prevent is about $200 the city never had to spend.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Bad work orders don't just cost money - they cost morale and time. A crew that spends a morning on three no-op dispatches is a crew that didn't get to three real dumpsites. Eliminating waste at the front of the funnel is often the fastest way to make the whole system more productive.
2. The Ordinary Work Order: Making the Good Ones Better
Most work orders are legitimate. They're the ones we actually want to happen. But even a good work order has a baseline handling cost - roughly $50 of intake, triage, routing, dispatch, and closeout - and that cost can be spread thinner or thicker depending on how well the system works.
When crews know exactly where every dumpsite is before they leave the yard, a few things change. They can batch nearby sites into a single efficient route instead of making separate trips. They can bring the right equipment the first time, avoiding return visits. They can size up a job from the imagery before they arrive, so the stop takes less time on the ground.
None of that changes the fact that the work order needs to be done. What changes is how much of the city's overhead every one of them consumes. A system that runs on complete, accurate, pre-triaged data gets more cleanups out of the same budget - not by cutting corners, but by cutting waste.
3. The Missing Work Order: The Most Expensive Kind
This is the category cities feel most, and see least. A missing work order is a dumpsite that never generated a report - because no one called it in, because the 311 system never heard about it, because the neighborhood that needed service the most filed the fewest complaints.
It costs the city $200 to $2,000, and the range is wide on purpose. At the low end, it's a pile that gets discovered late and cleared in a single routine stop. At the high end, it's a site that sat for weeks - growing, drawing more dumping, and turning into something that takes special equipment, extra staffing, or an emergency removal to handle. The longer a missing dumpsite goes unnoticed, the more expensive it becomes to finally address.
And there's a second cost that doesn't show up on an invoice: a missing work order signals to everyone on the block that the city isn't coming. Neglected piles attract more piles. Enforcement doesn't happen. The whole neighborhood degrades.
The one thing that reliably finds missing work orders is looking everywhere, every day, whether or not anyone complained. That's precisely what aerial detection does. Every dumpsite we surface that 311 never would have caught is somewhere between $200 and $2,000 the city would otherwise have paid later - plus the blight it would have caused in the meantime.
Complaint-Driven
- Work orders exist only where residents report
- Duplicates and stale reports create wasted dispatches
- Small piles grow into expensive cleanups
- Effort is hard to tie to any measurable result
- Vendor gets paid for activity, whatever the outcome
Outcome-Priced with Aerbits
- Complete daily coverage finds the unreported sites
- Verified, pre-triaged data reduces bad dispatches
- Problems caught early, while they're still cheap
- Results are measurable in the field, day over day
- Fee is tied to the outcomes we actually deliver
How the Math Works in the City's Favor
Put those three numbers together and the logic of outcome pricing becomes clear. Every bad work order we prevent saves the city around $200. Every ordinary work order we make more efficient stretches the value of the roughly $50 the city was going to spend anyway. And every missing work order we catch before it grows saves somewhere between $200 and $2,000 in future cleanup - not to mention the compounding cost of blight.
None of those savings require the city to spend more on crews, trucks, or equipment. They come from changing one thing: the quality and completeness of the data the system runs on. Better inputs, better outcomes - and a fee structure that keeps our incentives pointed in the same direction as the city's.
Aligned incentives
When a vendor is paid for effort, the vendor wins by doing more. When a vendor is paid for outcomes, the vendor wins by doing better. We'd rather be the second kind. It keeps us honest about what actually helps a city - and it means the city only pays for value it can point to.
Why We Do It This Way
Aerial detection is a young category, and there's no shortage of vendors eager to sell flights, images, and dashboards. We think the more important question isn't what the technology can do - it's what the city actually gets. A dumpsite found and cleaned is worth something. A report filed and forgotten is worth nothing. We'd rather be measured on the first kind.
Pricing for outcomes is our way of putting that principle into a contract. It's not a gimmick and it's not a discount. It's a statement about what we believe our product is for: not activity, but results. Fewer wasted dispatches, more efficient cleanups, and far fewer piles the city never even knew about.
That's the work worth paying for.
Want to talk through what outcome-based pricing could look like for your city? Read how Aerbits operates from flight plan to work order or see our cost analysis, then reach out below.