What is vendor lock-in?
Vendor lock-in is when leaving a product is painfully expensive because your prompts, history, indexes, or connections live only there. Portability is the ability to take a useful copy with you. No tool is perfectly portable. Some make it needlessly hard.
Also called: portability
In plain English
If the only copy of your customer-reply templates is inside a bot you cannot export, you are locked in. Export what you can on a schedule: templates, source documents, and a sample of logs. Assume chat history may not come with you in a neat file. Lock-in is real when your prompts, files, and history cannot leave. Export something this month so you know the shape. Keep the SOP and the good prompts in your own docs, not only inside the vendor's bot. Switching later will still hurt. It hurts less if the source of truth was never the chat window. Do not stay only because moving sounds annoying, and do not move only because a new demo was shiny. Once a quarter, export the prompts you would hate to retype. The export is the drill, not the divorce.
How an owner would use it
Keep the SOP and the prompt templates in a place you control, and paste them into the tool. Ask, before you buy, how you export. If the answer is a shrug, budget for a rewrite later or pick a different tool.
Common mistakes
Putting the only knowledge base inside a vendor that will not export is lock-in you chose. So is building fifty Zaps with no diagram. Do not confuse a model provider's portability with the app's. You might swap models and still be stuck in the help desk that holds the prompts.
A worked example
A brewery taproom
The tap list copy lives in the drive
This is an illustration, not a customer result. Event replies are drafted in a chat app, but the template and the current tap list live in the shared drive. If they leave the app, the drive still has the words and the list. The chat history is treated as disposable.
Related terms
Prompts and guides
Questions owners ask
What is vendor lock-in?
Vendor lock-in is the cost of leaving a tool because your work product or history cannot come with you in a usable form.
How do I reduce lock-in on AI tools?
Keep prompts and source documents in your own files. Ask about export before you commit. Do not let the chat be the only archive.
What is portability?
Portability means you can take a usable copy of your setup to another tool. Test the export once while leaving is still optional.
Product guides are on AI apps for business.