Vendor lock-in
What is vendor lock-in?
Vendor lock-in is the position a business is in when it cannot change supplier, platform or host without losing the site, the data, or most of what it has spent on them. It is built from code that is never handed over, accounts held in someone else’s name, data with no export and work nobody wrote down. It rarely disappears completely, but it can be reduced to a price and a timescale you know in advance.
Example
A company builds its site on a subscription builder at €39 a month. Three years later it has paid about €1,400 in rent and wants a shop of its own with a link to its warehouse software. Text, images and the customer list come out. The layout, the forms, the automated emails and the page addresses do not — those are built again, and the old addresses are redirected so search positions survive. The amounts are illustrative.
The opposite case looks safer and often is not. A bespoke site locks a business in just as firmly when the code lives only with the agency, the database has no export, the domain is registered in the agency’s name and nobody has written down how a release reaches the server. Changing team is then not a decision but a project.
The difference is not the technology. It is the handover: source code, a database export, accounts in your name, and a short description of how the site is deployed.
Why it matters for a business
Lock-in is paid for at the worst possible moment: when a subscription goes up, when a product is discontinued, when the team stops replying, or when the supplier is bought by someone else. The bill is then not for a new site but for recovering everything that was never yours.
Total independence does not exist. Every CMS, every host and every payment provider holds a piece of you. The workable goal is lock-in whose size you know: what you own, how long leaving would take and what it would cost. We ask the same questions when we build on our own platform: the answers belong in the contract rather than in an assumption.
What to ask
- Whose name are the domain, the hosting and the payment and courier accounts in?
- Do you receive the source code, and with what rights to use and change it?
- Can the database be exported in a readable format, and how often?
- Is there a written description of how the site is deployed and released?
- What would still run if the contract ended tomorrow, and for how long?
- On a subscription platform: what happens to page addresses and redirects when you leave?