Architecture Guides
for CTOs & Engineering
Build vs. buy analysis, migration guides, event-driven billing architecture, and the engineering debt that silently drains your team's velocity.
Browse Engineering Debt4 articles in Engineering Debt
The Intercom Blueprint: How to Build Outcome-Based AI Pricing Without Breaking Your Engineering Team
Intercom's $0.99 per AI resolution is the future of SaaS pricing. Here is the engineering architecture required to build outcome-based billing, and why you shouldn't build it from scratch.
From Cron Jobs to Event Streams: The Architecture Shift That Kills Billing Tech Debt
Batch billing is an autopsy. Event streaming is a live monitor. This deep-dive covers the three-phase migration from cron-job billing to event-driven settlement architecture.
Build vs. Buy in 2026: The True Cost of Homegrown Enterprise Monetization
Engineering teams burn 2.4 FTEs per year maintaining homegrown billing. The true cost of build versus buy in 2026, and why pricing belongs out of your codebase.
Why Every Internal Billing Engine Breaks at $10M ARR (And What the Postmortem Always Says)
Every homegrown billing system hits the same wall at $10M ARR. The postmortem always identifies the same failure modes. Here is what they are and why they are unavoidable.