Negative-Carry Features
Negative-Carry Features are software capabilities whose ongoing maintenance and compute costs exceed their revenue contribution.
“A feature that costs more to keep alive than it generates in customer value is not an asset; it is an unhedged financial liability.”
In the era of AI and token-based billing, features no longer have fixed marginal costs. A feature that costs 50 dollars per customer per month in LLM tokens but is bundled into a 30 dollar subscription creates negative unit economics at scale.
Multi-Hop Causal Traversal Engine
Explore how concepts dynamically feed into each other across 1-hop, 2-hop, and 3-hop transitive relationships. Click any node to navigate the causal highway.
Negative-Carry Features
Negative-Carry Features are software capabilities whose ongoing maintenance and compute costs exceed their revenue contribution.
Direct Relationships (4)
Transitive Neighbors (Connected via Hop 1)
Extended Causal Ripple Effects
Richard Ewing’s Research Thesis
We must enforce feature-level unit economics to protect enterprise SaaS gross margins.
Why This Specification Exists
Generative AI features with variable token consumption destroy SaaS gross margins.
Treating all engineering work as fixed OPEX.
No methodology for calculating individual feature gross margin contribution.
Negative-Carry Feature analysis linking usage COGS to subscription revenue.
What Changes If You Believe This?
Engineers optimize code paths for token efficiency and semantic cache hit rates.
Surfaces accurate gross margin contribution per feature for board reporting.
PMs evaluate financial sustainability before launching compute-intensive features.
Implements rate limits to prevent algorithmic denial-of-wallet attacks.
Recommended Action by Role
Require PMs to report Feature-Level Gross Margins during quarterly reviews.
AUEB Framework
Calculates AI Unit Economic Breakeven across feature portfolios.
Latest Publications & Research Activity
Most Companies Shouldn’t Be Using Autonomous Coding Agents Yet
The AI Coding Tool Battle Is Moving Somewhere More Important Than Code
How Does Meta’s Muse Code Compare to Other AI Coding Tools?
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:What is a Negative-Carry Feature?
A software capability whose direct compute, API, and engineering maintenance costs exceed the customer revenue it generates.
Q:How do you fix a Negative-Carry Feature?
Through semantic caching, model right-sizing, rate limiting, moving to usage-based pricing, or executing the Sunset Protocol.
Canonical Specification Origin
Feature carrying costs must not exceed revenue contribution.
Corpus Interconnections
Richard Ewing artifacts developed around this canonical framework, including publications, execution tools, and diagnostic models.
External Adoption & Peer Citations
Documented instances where independent researchers, engineering teams, and publications have cited, implemented, or referenced this concept outside Richard Ewing’s ecosystem.
External Evidence: No independently verified references recorded yet.
This concept is part of Richard Ewing’s original baseline canon. External citations and implementations are added only upon rigorous empirical verification.
Inspectable Evidence Ledger
Classified evidence items supporting, extending, or refining this canonical research specification.
Recommended Citation
Ewing, R. (2026). "Negative-Carry Features." Richard Ewing Research Canon. Available at: https://www.richardewing.io/concepts/negative-carry-features
@article{ewing_negative_carry_features,
author = {Ewing, Richard},
title = {Negative-Carry Features},
journal = {Richard Ewing Research Canon},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.richardewing.io/concepts/negative-carry-features}
}