Vendor lock-in, explained without the jargon

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Here is vendor lock-in without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The short version

Ask how you would leave before you sign. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

Data export should be tested, not assumed. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

A reasonable first step

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about vendor lock-in before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.