Vendor lock-in is the cost of leaving a platform once a workflow, its data or its configuration lives too deep inside that platform's infrastructure to move elsewhere. It grows the longer a business builds on tools that don't publish an export path.
Vendor lock-in happens gradually. A business connects a catalog, builds automation logic, or routes leads through one platform, and each addition makes leaving more expensive, even if nothing about the product itself gets worse.
The clearest test is portability: can the workflow, and the data behind it, move to another vendor without being rebuilt from scratch? A platform that syncs contacts to a CRM you own, or publishes a data-export feature, lowers lock-in. A platform whose configuration only exists inside its own subscription, with no published export path, raises it.
Lock-in doesn't show up on a pricing page. It shows up the day a business tries to switch tools and discovers how much of its actual workflow was never really portable. Weighing that cost against a lower price or deeper first-party integration is part of any real platform decision, not just a messaging-automation one.
