Lock-in

EU law takes up the subject in the Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854. Recital 88 states that unnecessarily high data egress charges (fees for moving data out of a service) and other unjustified charges unrelated to actual switching costs inhibit customers from switching. Such charges, it adds, have the potential to limit competition and cause lock-in effects for customers. Chapter VI covers switching between data processing services, meaning cloud-type services rather than bespoke software in general.

In our view, the dependency can also be technical, for instance when the source code stays with the provider, documentation is missing or data cannot be handed over in full. With bespoke software, the freedom to switch therefore depends on who owns the code and the data.

Our own rule is 'no lock-in': code, data and workflows belong to the client, documented and ready to hand over. For software we build on Symfony Symfony Symfony is an open-source PHP framework, a ready-made foundation for web applications, released under the MIT licence and developed by its community to a fixed release schedule. Read in the glossary → , the client gets full rights to the versioned source code, which is likewise documented and ready to hand over. There is no vendor lock-in, not even with us. For AI agents AI agent An AI agent is a software system, built on a large language model, that carries out actions on its own and uses interfaces to other programs to reach its goal. Read in the glossary → our principle is that the model is an interchangeable tool and the system belongs to the client. Ongoing optimisation work in e-commerce comes with no long-term commitment.