Today's business apps have no semantic layer for value and pricing. This is it.
The open specification for computable value models and pricing models. Free. Open. The common language that lets any system — CRM, CPQ, billing engine, ERP, or AI agent — read, validate, and act on value and pricing data without manual translation.
Not a better spreadsheet. Not a consultant's deck. A machine-readable schema, validated against a published standard, portable across any system without translation — so that when any tool, platform, or agent needs to know what something is worth or what it should cost, there is something structured to find.
# validate a value model or pricing model
$ value validate --schema v1.0.0
> ✓ conformant — thevalueproject.org v1.0.0█
Why this specification exists
✓Buying agents will retrieve your value model — be ready
✓Compatible with Google A2A and Anthropic MCP
✓Works across CRM, CPQ, billing, ERP, and financial systems
Specification Contents
Canonical Value Model and customer-specific instantiation. Computable value drivers, equations, and risk adjustments. Value Surplus = Total Economic Value − Price.
Complete vendor pricing catalog, deal configuration, and deterministic invoice output. Machine-executable equations with tiers, discounts, credits, and business rules.
Specifications
Pricing Model SpecificationspecArchitecture
The problem
Commerce has a protocol for everything except the thing every deal rests on.
We have TCP/IP for data. REST and OAuth for systems. OpenAPI for APIs. ISO 4217 for currency. Google A2A and Anthropic MCP for agent interoperability. Every layer of the commerce stack has a standard it can speak.
There is no standard for value and pricing.
Every B2B deal ever signed rests on a value model that lives in a spreadsheet no other system can read — or a slide deck no machine can interrogate. A CRM cannot pull the value logic behind a deal. A CPQ cannot tie a price to a quantified outcome. A CS platform cannot point to a common record when it's time to prove renewal ROI. Every team rebuilds the same logic from scratch, in a format nothing else can consume.
$140 billion is spent annually on revenue tools that still cannot answer the one question every buyer eventually asks: what's the ROI?
That gap is costly today. It becomes structural as AI buying agents take over B2B purchasing decisions. By 2028, 90% of B2B purchasing will be intermediated by AI agents. Those agents do not accept PDFs. They evaluate vendors on structured, machine-readable data — value drivers, pricing equations, confidence intervals — and they auto-reject what they cannot parse. A value model that lives in a spreadsheet is invisible to the agent economy. Invisible means disqualified.
thevalueproject.org fixes that.
Properties
COMPUTABLE
Any conforming system can execute the model and calculate value and price deterministically from declared inputs.
PORTABLE
Serialised to JSON and XML. Validated against published schemas. Exchangeable across any system without manual translation.
AGENT-READY
Designed for autonomous agent consumption. Compatible with Google A2A and Anthropic MCP protocols.
Specification
What the specification defines
Value Model
v1.0.0. Structured in the tradition of Tom Nagle's value-based pricing framework.
Reference Value plus Value Drivers — Revenue Enhancement, Cost Reduction, Risk Reduction, Operating Capital Reduction, Capital Investment Reduction, Option Expansion.
Computable with confidence intervals. Value Surplus = Total Economic Value − Price.
2 schemas: ValueModel, CustomerVariables. 2 specifications: value-page-spec, value-model-llm-reference.
Schemas: Apache 2.0. Specs: CC BY 4.0.
Pricing Model
v1.0.0. Covers flat fee, per-unit, tiered, volume-based, and usage-based (metered) pricing.
Machine-executable equations with scaling adjustments. ISO 4217 currency declarations on all price outputs. Both Base Models and Instantiated Models supported.
3 schemas: PricingModel, DealConfiguration, InvoiceStatement. 3 specifications: pricing-meta-model-spec, pricing-page-spec, pricing-model-llm-reference.
Schemas: Apache 2.0. Specs: CC BY 4.0.
Licensing
Specification prose — CC BY 4.0
Free to read, share, translate, and build on.
Credit thevalueproject.org as the source. Permanent attribution to valueIQ as originator.
Schemas and examples — Apache 2.0
Free to implement commercially.
Includes an explicit patent grant — the requirement enterprise legal teams look for before approving adoption of an open specification.
LICENSE-APACHE.md and LICENSE-CC.md at the repo root. github.com/The-Value-Project
Governance
Open governance from day one.
Now
valueIQ leads. All decisions transparent. Governance policy published.
10 production implementations
Independent TSC formed. Founding partners hold seats.
Long-term
Transfer to the Linux Foundation.
Roadmap
Built to evolve.
v1.0
Value Model + Pricing Model schemas. JSON Schema + XSD. Spec prose. Examples.
v2.0
Outcome-based pricing. Discounting. Emotional and community value.
v3.0
Credit-based pricing. Deal terms.
v4.0
API layer. Value API + Pricing API. Agent-to-agent transaction protocol.
Founding partners
Founding partners
Every foundational protocol was shaped by the organisations that needed it most. TCP/IP by the teams building the internet. OpenAPI by the teams building APIs. ISO 4217 by the institutions settling payments.
The semantic layer for value and pricing will be shaped by the platforms, revenue tools, and enterprises that live with the gap every day — and need to close it before the agent economy makes it structural.
Founding partners shape the specification from day one. They hold seats on the Technical Steering Committee when it forms at 10 production implementations.
Interested in founding partner status? hello@thevalueproject.org