The blue light from the monitor is vibrating at a frequency that feels like it is drilling into the bridge of Sarah’s nose. She is the CFO of a mid-sized logistics firm with 89 employees, and she has just opened an email that feels less like a business proposal and more like a ransom note. The renewal quote for their primary ERP system has jumped from $11999 to $23999 in a single cycle. No new features were added. No additional seats were provisioned. The representative on the other end of the thread, a person named Kyle who probably isn’t even 29 years old yet, used the phrase “market alignment” three times in his last response. Sarah stares at the screen until the numbers blur. She looks at her IT manager, who is sitting across the desk nervously tapping a pen against his knuckles 19 times a minute. “Is this a typo?” she asks. The silence that follows is the sound of a company realizing it no longer owns its own destiny. It is the sound of vendor lock-in reaching its terminal velocity.

Once the concrete is poured and the structure is 39 stories high, you don’t just decide to swap the foundation out because the price of cement went up. You are stuck. The vendors know this. They haven’t just built a product; they have built a cage, and they decorated it with a very user-friendly interface to make you forget you are behind bars until the door clicks shut.

The Absence of Loyalty

“In the old days, everything was modular. If a brick failed, you chiseled it out and put a new one in. But today, people want these high-performance, proprietary binders. They stick everything together so tight that if one part fails, the whole wall has to come down. They trade repairability for a quick set time.”

This is exactly what has happened to our digital infrastructure. We traded the “repairability” of owned licenses and open standards for the “quick set time” of SaaS. We wanted the easy setup. We wanted the 9-minute onboarding. We got it, and now we are paying for it with our autonomy. Taylor V. told me about a job he had where a previous contractor had used modern Portland cement on soft 19th-century bricks. Because the cement was harder than the brick, when the building shifted, the bricks shattered instead of the mortar giving way. That is what a 100% price hike does to a business. It shatters the foundation because the software is now more rigid than the company using it.

The Perpetual Tax and the VC Moat

I used to be a cheerleader for the subscription model. I remember writing an internal memo back in 2009 arguing that we should move everything to the cloud to save on capital expenditures. I was wrong. I admit it. I fell for the “easy” path. I didn’t realize that I was trading a one-time cost for a perpetual tax that could be raised at any moment without my consent. It is a deeply human flaw to over-invest in a flawed present because the perceived cost of starting over seems insurmountably high. We stay in bad relationships, we keep driving cars that are 19 years old and falling apart, and we keep paying for software that holds our data hostage because the alternative is a migration that feels like open-heart surgery.

The vendor lock-in isn’t an accident; it is the business model. When a startup raises its Series B or C round, the VCs aren’t looking at how much the software helps the user. They are looking at “moats.” In the software world, a moat is just a polite word for a hostage situation. How hard is it for the customer to leave? If the answer is “they can leave by Friday,” the valuation drops. If the answer is “it would take them 9 months and $499999 to migrate their data,” the valuation skyrockets. We are the ones swimming in those moats, trying to keep our heads above water while the castle walls get higher and higher. It is a cynical way to view the industry, but after seeing 59 different companies go through this same crisis, I find it hard to see it any other way.

Owning the Memories

I remember a specific instance where a firm I consulted for tried to move their data out of a major CRM. They had been paying $599 per user per month. When they requested a full export of their records, the vendor pointed to a clause on page 19 of the service agreement. The export would be provided in a proprietary format that was essentially a pile of scrambled code. To get it into a usable CSV, the firm had to hire a specialist for $159 per hour. It took 199 hours to finish. The vendor didn’t just own the tool; they owned the memories of the business. Every interaction with every customer for the last 9 years was locked in a vault, and the vendor had the only key.

This is why there is a growing movement toward smart licensing and true ownership. People are starting to realize that the “convenience” of the cloud is often just a lease on a treadmill that keeps getting faster. You have to look for alternatives that offer portability. You have to ask the hard questions during the 9-day trial period, not when the renewal is 19 days away. If you want to understand the depth of this shift and how to protect your business, reading industry insights like those found on

microsoft office tippscan provide the necessary perspective on why ownership still matters in a world that wants to rent you everything.

“The mortar is supposed to be the sacrificial lamb… It should weather and break so the stone stays whole. You can always replace mortar. You can’t replace the stone.”

Our software should be like that mortar. It should be something we can swap out, something that serves the “stone” of our business without being so hard that it cracks the whole structure when things get tight. But the SaaS giants have reversed the roles. They have made the business the sacrificial lamb, expected to bleed cash whenever the quarterly earnings report needs a boost.

The Harvest Mentality

I think about that commercial I cried at again. Why did it move me? Because it was about a dog that was abandoned and then found a home where he was truly valued. He wasn’t a “user” with a “lifetime value.” He was an individual. We deserve to be treated with that level of respect by the companies we fund. Instead, we are treated like a harvest. The price hikes aren’t about inflation; they are about testing the limits of our pain. How much can we raise the price before they actually try to leave? The answer is usually “a lot,” because the vendors have spent years making the exit door as heavy as a 9-ton vault.

There was a moment in the logistics firm’s office where the IT manager finally stopped tapping his pen. He looked at Sarah and said, “We could build our own. It would take 9 months, but we’d never have to pay Kyle again.” Sarah looked at the $23999 figure and then at the calendar. It was a terrifying thought. Starting over is always terrifying. But as Taylor V. says, you can’t fix a wall that was built with the wrong binder by just adding more of it. Eventually, you have to take the wall down and do it right.

The Correction Ahead

We are currently in a period of digital correction. The era of “growth at all costs” for SaaS companies is ending, which means they are turning to their existing customer base to squeeze out the missing margins. If you aren’t prepared for that, if you haven’t diversified your software stack or ensured that your data is truly yours, you are going to be the one funding their next 9-figure acquisition. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can demand better terms. We can support vendors who respect our right to leave. We can choose the mortar that protects the stone.