Tech Economics

Acqui-hires look like exits but rarely pay like them. Understanding the structure before you sign tells you exactly how much your equity is worth: often close to nothing.

Open source projects can have millions of users and still fail to convert that into sustainable revenue. Here's why the economics work against them.

Cutting your AWS bill feels like discipline. For a mid-sized SaaS company, it turned into the most expensive decision they made all year.

Adding engineers to a small team doesn't multiply output. It divides attention, multiplies coordination, and often cuts velocity in half before it adds anything.

First movers get the glory in startup mythology. Second movers get the market share. Here's why the pattern holds, and what it means for founders.

Amazon's most productive engineers sometimes don't write code at all. The logic is counterintuitive but the economics are clear.

Overcast built a loyal audience with a free app and nearly went broke serving it. The math behind free is stranger than most founders expect.

Winning a tech market sounds great until you see the bill. The company just behind the leader is often extracting far more profit per dollar of revenue.

Acqui-hires look like talent deals. But what companies are really buying is far more fragile than any contract reveals.

A record-breaking quarter can quietly become a company's biggest obstacle. Here's the mechanism, told through Basecamp's growth story.

A startup picked the middle storage tier to save money. Two years later, they'd spent three times what premium storage would have cost. Here's the math.

A single developer's burnout nearly broke a piece of infrastructure that half the internet depends on. The economics behind that story are worse than you think.

Salary is the starting point, not the answer. The true cost of a developer hour includes a long list of line items most engineering managers never total up.

Coming in under budget on a software project isn't a win. It's a confession that you didn't know what you were building.

The problem isn't that companies ignore cloud costs. It's that the structure of cloud pricing is designed to make accurate forecasting nearly impossible.

The software powering trillion-dollar companies was built by volunteers. Here's how that happened and why it keeps working until it suddenly doesn't.

When a SaaS company collapses, the founders move on. The customers are left holding broken software, locked data, and no good options.

Lines of code is the worst metric in software economics. Here's what actually predicts whether an engineer makes your team faster or slower.