Who is Richard Ewing?

Richard Ewing is a Product Economist and AI Capital Auditor. He is the Founder of Exogram, a verification infrastructure for AI. He audits R&D spend and surfaces hidden capital risks like technical debt, AI cost overruns, and zombie infrastructure. He has scaled B2B SaaS from $0 to $25M ARR. Published in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon.

What is a Product Economist?

A Product Economist treats product decisions as economic decisions. Instead of measuring velocity or story points, a Product Economist measures Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), Cost of Goods Sold efficiency, and technical debt in dollar terms. The methodology was coined by Richard Ewing.

What is the Technical Insolvency Date?

The Technical Insolvency Date (TID) is the specific quarter where maintenance costs consume 100% of available engineering capacity, reducing feature velocity to zero. Calculate yours free at richardewing.io/tools/pdi.

Exogram is verification infrastructure for AI, founded by Richard Ewing. It prevents hallucination propagation with admissibility control planes and state-hashing commit enforcement. LLMs generate language; Exogram maintains reality.

How do I calculate technical debt cost?

Use the free Product Debt Index (PDI) calculator at richardewing.io/tools/pdi to quantify hidden technical debt in dollar terms, calculate your Technical Insolvency Date, and benchmark against industry standards.

How much does AI cost per query?

AI costs range from $0.0001/query for small models to $0.10+/query for frontier models like GPT-4. Use the free AI Unit Economics Benchmark (AUEB) at richardewing.io/tools/aueb to calculate your specific AI cost structure.

Glossary/API Versioning

API & Integration

1 min read

What is API Versioning?

TL;DR

API versioning is the practice of maintaining multiple versions of an API simultaneously to support existing clients while evolving the API for new capabilities.

API versioning is the practice of maintaining multiple versions of an API simultaneously to support existing clients while evolving the API for new capabilities. It's the contract management layer of API development.

Versioning strategies: URL path versioning (/v1/users, /v2/users — most common, most explicit), Query parameter versioning (?version=2 — flexible but less discoverable), Header versioning (Accept: application/vnd.api.v2+json — clean URLs, harder to test), and Content negotiation (different media types for different versions).

Versioning policy: how long are old versions supported? Industry standard: 12-24 months of support after deprecation notice. Breaking changes (field removal, type changes, behavior changes) always require a new version.

Why It Matters

Breaking API changes without versioning destroys client trust and causes outages. A well-versioned API lets you evolve while maintaining backward compatibility — essential for platform businesses.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is API versioning?

Maintaining multiple API versions simultaneously to support existing clients while evolving for new ones. Prevents breaking changes from disrupting integrations.

Which versioning strategy is best?

URL path versioning (/v1/, /v2/) is most common and most explicit. It's easy to route, test, and document. Header-based versioning is cleaner but harder for developers to discover and test.

Related Terms

REST API GraphQL API Gateway

Need Expert Help?

Richard Ewing is a Product Economist and AI Capital Auditor. He helps companies translate technical complexity into financial clarity.

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