How much is a minute of an expert’s knowledge worth? The honest answer is that it varies wildly — and that the old ways of buying expertise were terrible at pricing it. A full-time hire bundles a few decisive minutes a week with forty hours of everything else. A consulting engagement bundles the insight with weeks of overhead. You pay for the package, not the part you needed.
Most of an expert’s value is concentrated in a small fraction of their time — the moments where their specific judgment is the answer. The rest is padding the old delivery model forced you to buy. When you can unbundle the decisive minutes from the overhead, you can finally price them honestly.
The concentration of value
Think about the last time an expert genuinely changed a decision. It probably wasn’t a day of their time — it was a sentence, a number, a “don’t do that, here’s why.” That sentence might be worth thousands. The old model couldn’t sell you just the sentence, so it sold you the day and hoped the sentence was in there.
You were never paying for the expert’s hour. You were paying for the minute inside it that mattered — and subsidizing the other fifty-nine.
Pricing when you can summon judgment on demand
On-demand changes the math. If you can reach exactly the right person for exactly the question, for fifteen minutes, then a minute of expertise can be priced for its real marginal value — high, because it’s the decisive part, but far cheaper in total than buying the whole bundled day. The expert earns more per minute; the buyer pays less per answer. The waste in the middle is what disappears.
That’s the quiet economic shift underneath on-demand expertise. Not cheaper experts — better-priced minutes. The decisive ones, sold for what they’re actually worth.