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.

What is Cloud Architecture?

Cloud architecture is the design of software systems to run on cloud computing platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). It encompasses compute, storage, networking, and services organized to meet scalability, reliability, and cost requirements.

Key principles: design for failure (assume any component can break), horizontal scaling (add more instances, not bigger instances), loose coupling (services communicate via APIs), statelessness (application state stored externally), and observability" class="text-cyan-400 hover:text-cyan-300 underline underline-offset-2 decoration-cyan-500/30 transition-colors">observability (every component emits metrics, logs, and traces).

Architecture patterns: monolith (single deployable unit), microservices (independently deployable services), serverless (event-driven functions), and hybrid (combining patterns based on use case).

Cloud costs are the fastest-growing line item for most tech companies, growing 20-30% annually. Architecture directly determines cost structure: poorly architected systems can cost 3-10x more than well-architected ones.

Why It Matters

Cloud architecture determines scalability, reliability, and cost. Poor architecture creates technical debt that compounds: scaling problems, outages, and runaway costs that eat into margins.

Frequently Asked Questions