Pay-for-Performance

Turn SLA promises into verified outcomes. AI extracts contract terms, monitors service performance, calculates contractual credits, and triggers performance-based payments through PayPal.

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Inspiration

Businesses often pay for services based on contractual promises, but when providers fail to meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs), claiming the appropriate credits can be complicated, manual, and time-consuming.

We asked a simple question: What if payments could reflect the actual performance of a service rather than just the promises made in a contract?

That idea inspired Pay-for-Performance.

What it does

Pay-for-Performance is an AI-powered SLA-based payment settlement platform that connects contract intelligence, performance monitoring, deterministic financial calculations, and PayPal payment execution.

The platform enables buyers to:

  • Upload SLA documents and extract measurable contractual commitments using AI.
  • Monitor service performance, including uptime and response latency.
  • Detect SLA breaches using performance evidence.
  • Calculate contractual service credits through a deterministic settlement engine.
  • Apply policy checks and human approval before payment execution.
  • Adjust payments through PayPal based on approved settlement decisions.
  • Trace every decision through an evidence-to-money audit trail.

How we built it

Our four-person team divided development into four core areas:

  1. PayPal Integration: Implemented payment authorization, capture, refunds, and transaction handling using PayPal REST APIs and Sandbox.
  2. AI & SLA Intelligence: Developed document-processing workflows to extract structured SLA commitments using Python, FastAPI, and Groq.
  3. Backend & Settlement Engine: Built the backend using Node.js, Express, TypeScript, and MongoDB, including performance monitoring, deterministic settlement calculations, policy evaluation, and audit records.
  4. Frontend & Dashboard: Developed the user interface using Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS.

Challenges we faced

One of our biggest challenges was connecting AI-generated contractual information with reliable financial decisions. We addressed this by separating AI-based contract interpretation from deterministic financial calculations.

We also worked on coordinating multiple services, maintaining payment integrity, handling authorization and settlement states, and creating an auditable connection between performance evidence and payment execution.

What we learned

Building Pay-for-Performance taught us that integrating AI into financial workflows requires more than intelligent automation. Financial decisions need validation, deterministic logic, human oversight, and reliable payment infrastructure.

Our central principle is simple:

AI interprets the contract. Evidence verifies performance. Deterministic rules calculate the settlement. PayPal executes the payment.

Pay-for-Performance — Don't pay for promises. Pay for verified performance.

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