Review Vendor Lock-In

Vendor lock-in is a condition in which switching from a provider becomes costly, risky, slow, or impractical because important technology, data, skills, contracts, or workflows depend on that provider.

A service may be easy to adopt but hard to leave. Custom interfaces, proprietary formats, model behavior, accumulated data, employee habits, and contract terms can all raise exit costs.

Lock-in changes negotiating power, resilience, future design choices, and the consequences of price, policy, service, or ownership changes.

A company cannot move its AI workflow without rewriting integrations, rebuilding evaluations, converting stored data, and retraining staff around different model behavior.

Vendor lock-in is not automatically bad or avoidable. The decision is whether the dependency is understood, proportionate, and supported by practical exit options.

Adoption cost gets you in; switching cost determines how easily you get out.

* [[build-vs-buy|Build vs. Buy]] * [[layered-sovereignty|Layered Sovereignty]] * [[concentration-risk|Concentration Risk]] * [[application-programming-interface|Application Programming Interface]] * [[total-cost-of-ownership|Total Cost of Ownership]]

* [NIST SP 800-146, *Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations*](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/146/final) — official guidance discussing interoperability, portability, migration, and dependency considerations when selecting cloud services. * [NIST SP 800-145, *The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing*](https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-145) — official baseline for the cloud service and deployment models in which portability and provider dependence must be evaluated.

* Assess the dependency by layer with [[layered-sovereignty|Layered Sovereignty]].