Vendor lock-in

Why it matters

It shifts negotiating power decisively toward the vendor. A business that cannot leave without a costly, disruptive migration has far less leverage on pricing, feature requests or service quality than one that genuinely could switch at reasonable cost, and vendors price and behave accordingly over time. It also affects pricing power over time specifically: vendors are well aware of how costly switching is for a locked-in customer, and price increases tend to accelerate once a customer has been established long enough that leaving is clearly no longer realistic. It also shows up in less obvious ways than data export: proprietary configuration, custom integrations built specifically against one vendor's API, and trained staff familiar only with one system's quirks all add to the real cost of leaving.

What goes wrong when it's handled badly

The clearest sign is a platform with no real data export, or an export that hands over raw content but not the actual working structure, logic and design, meaning 'leaving' really means starting over from scratch elsewhere. A business that discovers this only when they actually try to leave, rather than before committing, has already lost the negotiating position that mattered. A concrete example is a business built on a proprietary page-builder plugin discovering, at the point they finally want to leave, that the export only provides raw text and images, with every layout, interaction and design decision left behind entirely. Asking, before committing to a platform, exactly what a full, working export actually includes is the specific question that surfaces this risk before it becomes a problem rather than after. Weighing switching cost explicitly as part of any platform decision, not only features and price, is what prevents this risk from being discovered only once it is too late to matter.