Switching Cost
The total difficulty, friction, or loss faced when moving between platforms - the moat that keeps people locked in even when unhappy.
Switching cost is the total difficulty, friction, or loss a user (or business) faces when moving from one product, service, or platform to another. High switching costs are the moat that keeps people locked in – even when they are unhappy.
Switching costs are not only monetary. They include the time to learn a new tool, the data that cannot be exported, the network of contacts who will not follow you, the integrations that break, and the sheer effort of redoing years of accumulated setup.
Why platforms engineer them
Enshittification depends on high switching costs. A platform can only afford to degrade its product, raise prices, or extract more surplus if its users cannot easily leave. So the rational play is to raise the walls: make sign-up effortless but data export painful, make your ecosystem the default, and let users invest years of history that would be lost by leaving.
The classic pattern
- Generous phase: low friction, open data, cheap – build the moat with goodwill.
- Lock-in phase: users accumulate data, contacts, and habits that make leaving costly.
- Squeeze phase: the platform tightens terms, knowing the switching cost now exceeds the annoyance.
Understanding switching costs is the key to resisting enshittification: prefer tools that keep your data portable, your identity independent, and your exit cheap.