Three myths about vendor lock-in

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few things about vendor lock-in that get repeated more often than they get checked.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

“It only matters for big sites”

Ask how you would leave before you sign. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

“Our platform handles it”

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.