The better the tool gets, the harder it is to leave.
Your instructions, integrations, and workflows compound in one direction. The system learns your judgment. Switching costs aren’t contractual. They’re structural.
Most people don’t notice until they’re already priced in.
I built my infrastructure to avoid this. Obsidian over Notion. nodl.cloud over a managed service. I co-founded it, sovereign. An agent stack I can fork. Not because the proprietary tools are worse. Because I watched what dependency does when the relationship changes.
Bitcoin solved this for money fifteen years ago. The protocol is open. Any client can run it. No vendor decides whether you stay.
AI hasn’t solved this. The tools that shape how you think are accumulating in closed stacks. Most people are building deep into an environment someone else controls.
The upgrade is real. So is the lock-in.