# Vendor lock-in

> VI: https://5ac.vn/wiki/vendor-lock-in/ · EN: https://5ac.vn/en/wiki/vendor-lock-in/ · lang: en · spec_as_of 2026-10-19 (spec no formal spec) · cluster C17

When rights move to the vendor: prices change, terms change, products get retired — and the decision was made somewhere else before you heard about it.

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## Definition

Vendor lock-in is the state where leaving costs so much that a company stays with a provider it no longer wants, or has to rebuild almost from scratch to move. The lock is never a single feature; it is the moment control passes to the other side: the vendor sets the price, the terms, the roadmap, and even when you find out. 5ac's piece puts the contrast in one line — with vendor lock-in your rights live in a service agreement, with open source your rights live in the law, and the law does not change its terms at midnight.

## Mechanism

Four locks show up once AI goes into production, each with the question to ask in the demo:

| Lock | What it looks like | The question for the vendor |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Data and logs sit in the vendor's cloud | history you cannot export | "Can I pull the full log and dataset out, and how long does it take?" |
| The vendor owns the orchestration layer | every workflow goes through their one surface | "In six months I swap models and tighten permissions but keep the workflow intact — how long?" |
| Price and terms change after you depend on them | a price-rise email, narrowed terms | "Which terms hold the price for 12 months?" |
| Workflows written in the vendor's own format | scripts that run on one platform only | "Where exactly is my exit path?" |

Two of these show up in the research. The enterprise architects behind ClouNS (arXiv:1709.04883) find that most cloud service categories push toward lock-in, so their reference model deliberately rests on a small subset of well-standardized infrastructure services. For serverless — the highest abstraction of the lot — Supporting Multi-Cloud (arXiv:2209.09367) reports that lock-in is inherent to it, and names the antidote: run several providers, compare each one on performance and cost, and keep workload portability.

## Application context

5ac's control-plane piece compresses the audit into a checklist: separate agents by role, approval gates for real actions, logs readable per workflow, a cost ceiling or quota, model changes without rewriting the workflow, private or self-hosted deployment, and a clear exit path. Fail three or more and you are not ready to scale — fine for experiments, not for a live operating system.

On the other side of the fence sits the composable runtime: a managed computer in the cloud is a rented appliance, while a runtime placed in an environment you control is an OS you own — data, logs, memory, scheduled jobs and the one line of config that swaps models. For a company with no IT team, the honest path is a managed deployment on open-source foundations, so the right to leave still lives in the law.

## Sources fetched

- [Agent Control Plane for Vietnamese SMBs — 7 Product Requirements to Avoid Vendor Lock-In](/en/blog/agent-control-plane-vietnam-smb/) — seven requirements, the 30-minute checklist, exit path — accessed 2026-10-19
- [Grok Bot vs Hermes Agent: Why 5ac chooses a composable runtime](/en/blog/grok-bot-vs-hermes-agent-why-5ac-chooses-composable-runtime/) — managed computer versus composable runtime, the lock-in comparison table — accessed 2026-10-19
- [Own Your Destiny: "Duy ngã độc tôn" and the Open-Source Philosophy of G-Company OS](/en/blog/open-source-own-your-destiny-gcompany-os/) — service agreement versus law, the escape hatch, the MIT and Apache stack — accessed 2026-10-19
- <https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09367> — Supporting Multi-Cloud in Serverless Computing (v4) — verified via arXiv API 2026-10-19
- <https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04883> — ClouNS: a cloud-native application reference model for enterprise architects (v1) — verified via arXiv API 2026-10-19

## Related

- [AI Agent](/en/wiki/ai-agent/)
- [Agentic RAG](/en/wiki/agentic-rag/)
- [Agent Governance](/en/wiki/agent-governance/)
- [One-Person Company](/en/wiki/one-person-company/)
- [Local LLM Deployment](/en/wiki/local-llm-deployment/)