Cost is paid during development and maintenance. Value is reaped during usable life. The two periods overlap. Then subtract value from cost and integrate. Maxim

Cost is paid during development and maintenance. Value is reaped during usable life. The two periods overlap. Then subtract value from cost and integrate. Maximize that number. Easily leads to conclusions of "you don't need this to scale" vs "build this to scale" and "you need to make this extensible" vs "just ship the hacky thing". Just need to know what your params are and place uncertainty on it. Once I wrote a program in a day. Did a kind of pricing. Hacky af. Just tech demo. Over time people start depending on it. One year later it breaks. Too many products priced, internal ring buffer only has few slots. Pricing stalls for all products. "This is a company-killing issue!" Everyone yells. Sure, my mistake. I let thing get depended on without productifying but original choice was fine since it allowed iteration on something else that made money. Just when situation changes you gotta adapt. No rules about that except just short loop on quality required and time spent.