Adopting a new tool almost always feels like a one-way decision about getting in: how quickly can we start, how well does it do the job, what does it cost. The question that gets asked far less often, and matters far more later, is how you would get out. Every platform a business comes to rely on — the system that holds its customer records, its accounts, its files, its communications — is also a dependency, and dependencies vary enormously in how hard they are to leave. Some you could walk away from in a weekend. Others hold your data in a form you cannot easily extract, wrapped in a way that makes moving to a competitor so painful that in practice you never do. That difficulty is called lock-in, and it is worth understanding before you are inside it.
Lock-in matters because it quietly shifts the balance of power after you have committed. A provider that knows you cannot practically leave has less reason to keep its prices fair, its service good, or its product improving, because your alternative — extracting years of accumulated data and rebuilding elsewhere — is so costly that you will tolerate a great deal to avoid it. This is not necessarily malicious; a business built around a platform naturally accumulates data, customisation and habit that make it sticky. But the effect is the same whether it is designed or emergent: the more essential a tool becomes and the harder it is to leave, the more of your future you have handed to someone else's decisions about price, direction and survival.
The risks are not only about a provider behaving badly. A platform you depend on can raise its prices, discontinue the feature you built around, change in a direction that no longer suits you, be acquired by someone with different priorities, or simply shut down. In every one of those cases, the question that decides how much trouble you are in is the same: can you get your data out, in a usable form, and take it somewhere else? If the answer is yes, a bad change by a provider is an inconvenience. If the answer is no, it is a crisis, because your business's essential records are hostage to a decision you do not control.
The practical protection is to ask the exit question before you enter, and it costs almost nothing to ask. Before depending on a platform, find out whether you can export your data, in a standard and complete form rather than a crippled sample, and ideally test that export while things are calm rather than discovering its limits in an emergency. Favour tools that make leaving easy, because a provider confident enough to let you go is usually one competing on quality rather than captivity. Keep your own copy of the data that truly matters where you can. None of this means avoiding platforms — modern business is built on them. It means treating the ability to leave as a feature you evaluate up front, because the cheapest time to secure your exit is before you have any reason to use it.