Switching Costs
The effort, money, or risk a customer faces to move from your product to a competitor's, learning a new tool, migrating data, retraining a team. High switching costs keep customers put.
Why it matters
Switching costs are a real moat: the higher they are, the stickier your customers and the safer your revenue. Building them ethically, through genuine integration and value, protects you far more than locking people in by force.
For example
A company that has built its whole workflow on Salesforce and trained its team on it faces high switching costs, so it stays even when a rival is cheaper.
Worth your time
Related terms
Go deeper
See how founders actually handle this on Growing and marketing, part of the Starting Up hub.
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