[Brian_K_White]

And in real life I've seen vendor lock-in cause exactly every worst fear and worse.

Vendor lock-in is only tolerable when the service is so easily swapped out that it's not actually vendor lock-in.

There is no valid argument for not worrying about that before it happens, and bending pretty far to avoid it. No matter how hard you work to stay as portable as possible early and at each daily step along the way, it's 10x or 1000x less than dealing with it later.

If you're just talking about a pluggable service, well then by definition that's not really lock-in.

[abofh]

I believe you, I do, but for every company afraid to use the features of a service they pay for because of vendor lock in, I can show you five, six and seven figure bills attributable to DIY. Nothing is drop in if it's value added - if it's not value added, why are you using a vendor at all?

Portability is a huge myth that eats engineers hours like a snack every single day and rarely pays off.

[Brian_K_White]

I believe that you believe me, so I'll rest there, since I don't want to speak actual products and timescales and business sizes and buusiness types required to make the claim more solid.