When you struggle to leave a software tool — the export is broken, the format is proprietary, the migration is a nightmare — it's tempting to chalk it up to technical limitation or neglect. Usually it's neither. It's design. Switching costs are a feature, carefully built and lovingly maintained, because the harder you are to lose, the less the vendor has to earn your stay. The friction isn't a bug they haven't fixed. It's a moat they invested in.
The economics that reward friction.
A vendor's retention can come from two sources: you stay because the product is the best option, or you stay because leaving is too painful. The first requires continuous excellence. The second requires a one-time investment in lock-in that pays dividends forever. For a rational, margin-focused company, building switching costs is often the higher-ROI choice — it converts retention from an ongoing obligation into a sunk barrier. So they build the barrier.
Ask why leaving is hard. The answer is almost never “we didn't get to it.” It's “we'd rather you didn't.”
The forms switching costs take.
They're not always obvious. Data lock-in: exports that omit the relationships, so you get rows but not the structure that made them useful. Format lock-in: proprietary files only their tool can read. Workflow lock-in: your processes built so deeply around their quirks that leaving means re-learning how you work. Integration lock-in: a web of connections that all break the day you go. Each is a switching cost, and each was a choice.
How to shop against it.
The defense is to evaluate the exit before you enter. Test the export on day one, not day one-thousand. Ask whether your data comes out with its relationships intact or as orphaned rows. Check whether the API is free and complete. The vendor's answers tell you which retention strategy they've chosen — excellence or lock-in — and that's the single most predictive thing you can learn about how they'll treat you once you've committed.
We made switching costs low on purpose — one-click export, free API, complete data with its structure intact — because we wanted to be forced into the first retention strategy, not the second. A company that makes leaving easy is making a statement about why it expects you to stay. Read every vendor's exit as exactly that statement, because that's what it is.