---
title: "Nobody in your company can price the exit from your own IT"
url: "https://sovereos.com/blog/nobody-can-price-the-exit"
description: "Ask what leaving your current suite would cost in money, weeks and data that does not come out cleanly. The absence of an answer is itself the finding."
---

# Nobody in your company can price the exit from your own IT

August 20, 2026·2 min read·SovereOS

Here is a question worth asking at the next management meeting: if we had to leave our current platform, what would it cost, how long would it take, and what would we lose?

In most companies nobody can answer. Not because it is a difficult question, but because it has never been asked, and the switching cost is therefore an unmeasured liability sitting underneath every renewal negotiation the company will ever have.

## The four components

**Money.** New licences, migration work, temporary parallel running, and the hours of your own people. The last one is the largest and the one nobody counts because it does not appear on an invoice.

**Time.** Not the project plan — the realistic version, including the month where both systems run and nobody is sure which is authoritative.

**Data.** What comes out and in what shape. Mail usually exports. Documents usually export. Permissions, sharing history, version history, chat threads, calendars with recurring exceptions, and the connections between all of them frequently do not.

**Behaviour.** Every process built around the current tool, every shortcut people learned, every integration somebody set up in 2022 and did not document.

Add these up and you get a number. That number is what your current supplier could extract before leaving becomes rational, and neither of you knows it.

## Why nobody measures it

**It only matters when you leave.** Until then it costs nothing to ignore, which is exactly the shape of every liability that eventually surprises somebody.

**It is unpleasant.** The person who chose the platform has to price their own decision, and the number is often larger than the annual spend.

**There is no trigger.** Nothing in a renewal process asks for it. Renewals ask about price and features, so that is what gets discussed.

**Suppliers do not volunteer it.** Reasonably. It is not their job to help you calculate the cost of leaving them.

## What measuring it changes

**Renewals become negotiations.** A company that knows its exit costs is negotiating with information. One that does not is being told a price.

**New decisions get better.** When a new tool is being chosen, the question what would leaving cost changes which tool wins, and it usually changes it in a good direction.

**Some costs turn out to be small.** Not everything is locked in. Frequently the mail and the documents are portable and the whole dependency is concentrated in one place — usually identity — which means one problem to solve rather than twelve.

**It puts a number on sovereignty.** Independence stops being a preference and becomes an avoided cost, which is a conversation a finance director can have.

## How to actually get the number

Pick the three systems the company would struggle most without. For each, ask the supplier in writing what an export contains and in what format. Ask your own people how long the last comparable migration took, then apply the standard correction for that estimate. And check the contract for what happens to your data on termination, including the retention period and whether it is deleted or held.

That is a week of work and it produces a figure with a range. The figure will be uncomfortable, which is the point: an uncomfortable number you can see is a much better position than a comfortable assumption you cannot.

-   lock-in
-   migration
-   cost
-   audit

## Keep reading

-   [Your continuity plan is one person](https://sovereos.com/blog/your-continuity-plan-is-one-person)
-   [Identity is the real lock-in](https://sovereos.com/blog/identity-is-the-real-lock-in)