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 making data hard to move protects their inflated margins.

2. 2.

   They have regularly raised prices by 6–12% with 90 days notice on software that needs 18 months to migrate away from.

3. 3.

   They have built an ecosystem of thousands of 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 hundreds of dollars more per user per month for AI capabilities layered on top of the same infrastructure customers have been overpaying on for years. Some have even raised prices 30–40% at renewal.

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 deprecated production systems mid-contract, forcing unplanned migrations at the customer's cost on vendor timelines, not customer ones.

The Turning Point

These mechanisms worked for twenty years because the alternative, custom software, was prohibitively expensive. A CRM that cost $3–5 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. The engineering system Future Industries runs today ships comparable scope in 10 weeks at a fraction of that cost. The software that justified the per-seat ransom can now be built and operated for less than a single year of the ransom.

The data migration that once required six-figure manual extraction can now be automated. The business processes that once had to be rebuilt from scratch around a new platform can be mapped directly from the system being replaced. The two conversion barriers that gave vendor extraction its staying power, the cost of moving data and the cost of re-implementing process, have both collapsed. The leverage is gone.

The Declaration

We therefore declare:

That enterprises have the right to software built for their business, to own their data, and to control their own technical destiny.

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

That Future Industries 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.

Future Industries builds the software that makes leaving possible, automates the data migration that makes it viable, and operates the result from day one. The exit exists.

Deconversion | 2026