product-economics

# Product economics A product can pass every gate this pipeline has — architecture reviewed, tests green, security signed off, deployed — and still lose money on every user. The pipeline is silent about that, and silence reads as approval. This is the missing question, and it is three questions: 1. **Does a unit pay for itself?** (contribution margin) 2. **What is the price, and on what basis?** (pricing) 3. **Are there enough units to matter?** (market size, bottom-up) ## The rule that makes this worth doing **Every number carries its provenance**, in the notation the brief already uses — do not invent a second vocabulary for this: - `[source: <where it was read>]` — an invoice, a usage log, a competitor's published price with the date you checked it - `[assumption]` — you made it up, and saying so is the point `artifact-lint` already rejects a figure carrying neither. That rule was written for the Problem section; it binds here at least as hard, because arithmetic launders provenance: an `[assumption]` conversion rate and a `[source:]` one are indistinguishable once they have been multiplied together, and the product of two guesses is presented with the same confidence as a measurement. **The third state is the one the notation has no symbol for: a number nobody knows.** Do not fill that hole with a plausible figure — a plausible figure becomes `[assumption]`, gets multiplied, and disappears into a margin. Write the line as an open question instead, and carry it i...