The most durable businesses will charge for the delta they create, not the software they ship. That could mean performance fees, success fees, risk-sharing, or embedded monetization through the business process itself. In that world, margins are less a function of code efficiency and more a function of how close you are to economic outcomes. The deeper moat for builders is compounding feedback. Systems that learn from every transaction, workflow completion, rejected recommendation, and human override will pull away from static products. This is the hidden engine of defensibility: not just data volume, but data that changes the product and the product that changes the data. The strategic question for every operator is whether they are building a product or a flywheel. The former gets copied. The latter compounds. Which side of that divide are you on?