Saying you are "held hostage" might be a bit of a dramatic way to phrase it, but for some companies a change like this actually makes a difference. Such is the life of relying on any third-party services though.
Also, pointing out "faults" is not helpful. It's unproductive conversation. Many companies are built upon third-party services that they are (probably falsely) under the impression will not change. It's not your "fault" if you decide to use AWS services and become deeply integrated and they increase their prices by 10% and you can no longer afford their services... It's no one's fault. It's just unfortunate and all you can do is try to work around it, or close the company.
This is the real problem.
From the sidelines, it's easy to dismiss an additional 0.5% overhead as trivial. After all, that's less than 1%, right?
But it's not so simple. That 0.5% comes out of the profit margin. If a company has 50% profit margins, losing that extra 0.5% isn't a big deal. However, if a company is operating on 10% margins, that 0.5% suddenly becomes an extra 5% overhead.
It's your fault if you chose lockin. If you don't want to talk about fault, fine, but then don't go on to talk about fault :)
You have to start somewhere. Unless you have been handed a substantial amount of starting money and baked "we need to be provider agnostic" into your company beliefs from the beginning, it's rarely an early priority. Becoming profitable is usually what comes first. Securing a stronger foundation for your platform comes over time.
> If you don't want to talk about fault, fine, but then don't go on to talk about fault :)
What is the point of saying this?
> What is the point of saying this?
Whatever criteria you used to justify asking this question probably also apply to it.
Nobody said it was a little bit of money? Where is this comment coming from?
I have no idea if it's a good point or not.
Yet everyone did before stripe.
Exactly this. We started being Stripe customers after they bought some third party several years ago. While Stripe maintained the deal it was good for our business but recently they decided to end the deal we had (I don't blame them, it was a very sweet deal for us). Fortunately my startup always have had more than one provider and now we can calculate a "least cost routing" process, which will definitely move a lot of our volume outside of Stripe.
But it is just that, business. You should not trust any one provider with your business, not even AWS (i.e. not even at that level).
You're literally moving millions of dollars a year through your billing platform. That's not a little bit of money. That's a lot. Own it.
You're not a hostage. You're deeply integrated through nobody's fault but your own.