“So many apps, if they're four, five, six years old, probably have more business strategy debt than they realise — features they give away for free that maybe are higher value, ways they do things that haven't been rethought in years.”

Business strategy debt accrues silently in apps older than four years

Business strategy debt is the less-discussed cousin of technical debt: features misclassified as free, pricing that predates current consumer behaviour, monetisation models chosen opportunistically rather than strategically. The older the app, the more this accumulates unnoticed. Even a growing app can unlock substantial upside from a single rigorous re-evaluation of the free/paid line and the underlying assumptions it rests on.