Vendor Lock-In

Vendor lock-in is the degree to which your product depends on a specific platform that would be painful, slow, or expensive to leave. In no-code it's especially acute: your app's logic, data model, and UI often live inside a proprietary builder (Bubble, Airtable, Webflow) with no clean export, so switching tools can mean rebuilding from scratch. It matters because the convenience that gets you to launch fast is the same coupling that limits you later — on pricing changes, feature gaps, performance ceilings, or an acquisition. For founders, the practical move is to weigh lock-in against speed deliberately: keep your data portable (regular exports, an owned database where possible), isolate business logic you can't afford to lose, and read the platform's export and API terms before you commit. Some lock-in is a fair trade for shipping months sooner; unpriced, unbounded lock-in is a risk to your company's future optionality.