The Per-Seat Ransom

For more than two decades, the enterprise software industry has operated on a simple premise: make leaving expensive enough that customers stop thinking about it. What follows is a count of the specific mechanisms by which this has been accomplished — and a declaration that the era in which these mechanisms had real power is over.

The Count of Indictments

1. 1.

   They have stored customer data in proprietary formats that cost six figures to extract — not because open formats were technically inferior, but because extraction cost is switching cost.

2. 2.

   They have raised prices by 6% with 90 days notice on contracts that required 18 months and seven figures to implement.

3. 3.

   They have built an ecosystem of 3,800 consulting partners whose revenue, per IDC at $6.19 in services for every $1 of license revenue, depends entirely on customer dependency.

4. 4.

   They have shipped platform upgrades that broke customer customizations, then invoiced those customers through their partner network to repair what the upgrade destroyed.

5. 5.

   They have charged $500 per user per month for AI capabilities layered on top of the same infrastructure customers have been overpaying for since 2010.

6. 6.

   They have held feature requests for three years, then released those features as a new pricing tier.

7. 7.

   They have designed switching costs into the architecture of their products — proprietary APIs, execution environments, workflow engines — not because it served the customer, but because it served the renewal.

8. 8.

   They have paid consulting firms to certify their platform, then used those certifications to crowd out independent technical advice, ensuring that the firms customers trust for guidance are the firms most financially dependent on the platform's continuation.

The Turning Point

These mechanisms worked for twenty years because the alternative — custom software — was prohibitively expensive. A CRM that cost $2 million to build and 18 months to deliver made a $300 per user per month subscription rational, even with its costs and constraints.

That calculation has permanently changed. AI-assisted development has compressed development timelines from months to weeks and costs by 50 to 70 percent. The software that justified the per-seat ransom can now be built, owned, and operated for a fraction of what the ransom costs annually. The leverage is gone.

The Declaration

We therefore declare:

That enterprises have the right to own their software, their data, and their technical infrastructure.

That the per-seat ransom is not the cost of software — it is the cost of dependency, and dependency is now optional.

That AI has not merely improved the efficiency of software development; it has ended the monopoly that made vendor extraction possible.

That the companies which act on this fact in 2026 will hold a structural cost advantage over those that wait until their vendors force the issue.

We are here to help you act on it.

Deconversion | 2026