The state cannot cancel the contract. There is no alternative supplier. There is no exit.
Literal meaning: Vendor lock-in describes a state of dependency on a specific technology vendor in which switching costs — technical, financial, contractual, or organisational — are so high that the customer has no practical exit option. The vendor’s commercial interests diverge from the customer’s interests, but the customer cannot leave.
Origin: The concept is well-established in enterprise technology procurement, where it describes the situation of organisations that have built their operations on proprietary systems — SAP, Oracle, Salesforce — whose data formats, APIs, and integrations make migration to alternatives prohibitively costly. In the public sector, vendor lock-in has been documented extensively: governments, hospitals, schools, and public authorities that have outsourced core functions to private technology vendors often find that they cannot practically exit those contracts without unacceptable disruption.
Dependency on a technology vendor from which exit is practically impossible — where the cost of switching exceeds the cost of staying, regardless of what staying costs.
The Appeal: Vendor relationships begin as genuine partnerships. The vendor’s specialisation, scale, and investment in the technology typically produce better outcomes than in-house alternatives at the point of adoption. The lock-in develops gradually as the integration deepens.
The Friction: Enshittification — the predictable deterioration of platform quality once dominance is achieved — is the commercial consequence: vendors who know customers cannot leave have no competitive incentive to maintain service quality. CLOUD Act intensifies public sector lock-in with a legal dimension: organisations locked into US cloud providers are also locked into the CLOUD Act’s jurisdictional requirements. Technofeudalism — platform owners as feudal lords — is the structural analogy: the locked-in customer is in the position of a serf who cannot leave the estate without giving up everything they have built there. Brussels Effect creates some counter-pressure: interoperability requirements in the Digital Markets Act reduce some forms of technical lock-in for the largest platforms.
Why This Matters: Vendor lock-in names the specific mechanism by which temporary commercial relationships become permanent structural dependencies. Once you see the pattern — integration that deepens until exit becomes impossible — you can ask at the point of adoption: what would it cost to leave in five years?
Related terms: Enshittification · CLOUD Act · Technofeudalism · Surveillance Capitalism · Brussels Effect · Algorithmic Violence · Fair Patterns
Read more:
- Critical analysis of vendor lock-in and its impact on cloud computing migration: a business perspective — Opara-Martins, J., Sahandi, R. & Tian, F. (2016). Journal of Cloud Computing
- The Internet Con — Doctorow, C. (2023). Verso Books
- Critical Review of Vendor Lock-in and its Impact on Adoption of Cloud Computing — Opara-Martins, J., Sahandi, R. & Tian, F. (2014). International Conference on Information Society (i-Society 2014)
- From Cloud Giants to Local LLMs: Escaping Vendor Lock-In in 2025 — North Atlantic (2025). North Atlantic From Cloud Giants to Local LLMs: Escaping Vendor Lock-In in 2025 — North Atlantic (2025). North Atlantic