An independent briefing for technology leaders

The licence is free; the fourteen years of feeding it are not. Here's the maintenance tax nobody budgets for — and how to fund the load-bearing “free” software before its lone maintainer walks.

Cloud has FinOps; your SaaS estate has a closet full of redundant subscriptions nobody owns. Here's how showback — not a spending crackdown — surfaces the duplicates and the trust problem underneath them.

“Fractions of a cent per call” is how a feature looks cheap right up until the invoice. Here's how to actually cost a million tokens — and why “AI is strategic” is the reason to know your unit economics, not skip them.

Blockchain's one durable lesson isn't crypto — it's incentive design. Here's what token economies teach about the metrics and rewards you set, and how they get gamed exactly as written.

Netflix took seven years to leave its data centres on purpose. Here's what staged, stoppable commitments look like in real enterprise architecture — and why the “boring” incremental path is usually the valuable one.

WACC, hurdle rate, or risk-adjusted? For a cloud commitment the choice of rate quietly decides the answer — and the room is usually arguing about risk appetite without saying so. Here's which rate fits which decision.

A single three-year forecast is precise, confident, and almost always wrong. Here's why a small set of named scenarios beats one number — and how to get a board to value being roughly right over precisely wrong.

Every multi-year migration reaches the point where the smart move is to stop — and the spent millions scream not to. Here's why sunk cost is a reputational trap, not a financial one, and how to build the off-ramp before you need it.

Score the vendors, weight the criteria, and the matrix hands you an answer to two decimal places. But the inputs were guesses. Here's how false precision launders a gut call into “rigour” — and what to do instead.

Approve a $40M migration and the cash flows are only half of what you're buying — the rest is a portfolio of decisions your business case pretends you've already made. Here is how to price the options you actually hold.