Every AI vendor is easy to marry and expensive to divorce. Sign the paperwork before the honeymoon: tell this tool which AI providers you depend on, what data lives with each, and how deeply they're wired into your stack — and it drafts your lock-in exit plan: data-export steps per vendor, the contract traps to verify in your agreements, and the safest switching order.
Key figure: 63% of organizations in IBM's 2025 breach study had no AI governance policy, and 97% of AI-breach victims had no proper AI access controls (IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025).
An AI vendor prenup is an exit plan you write before signing: data export rights, neutral formats, contract traps to avoid, and a tested migration order. Like a marriage prenup, it is cheapest to negotiate while everyone is still friendly.
Your prenup says "check the contract." TermsWatch actually reads it — weekly AI-vendor terms diffs so price hikes, data-use changes, and quiet clause edits never surprise you.
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Get TermsWatch early access →Lock-in is the cost of leaving: data that only exists inside one provider's systems, workflows built on provider-specific features, contracts with renewal traps.
Inventory everything you store there, export via the provider's dashboard or API in a neutral format, verify completeness by spot-checking record counts, save a local copy.
Auto-renewal clauses and notice requirements, data retention after termination, egress or extraction fees, price-change notice periods, minimum spend commitments.
Least-integrated first. Move the shallowest dependency first to prove your export process works, then climb the stack.
At least yearly, and immediately after any trigger event: a price change, a model deprecation, a terms-of-service update, or a new integration.
Lock-in is the cost of leaving: data that only exists inside one provider's systems, workflows built on provider-specific features, contracts with renewal traps, and staff who only know one API. It's not that switching is impossible — it's that the longer you wait to plan it, the more expensive it gets.
Start with an inventory of everything you store there — prompts, conversation logs, fine-tunes, embeddings, API keys and configs. Export through the provider's dashboard or API, verify completeness by spot-checking record counts, save a copy in a neutral format, and confirm deletion after you've migrated. This tool generates the per-vendor steps for your setup above.
Auto-renewal clauses and how notice must be given; what happens to your data after termination (retention vs. deletion, and on whose servers); egress or extraction fees; price-change notice periods; minimum spend commitments; and what survives termination — confidentiality and data obligations usually do. Verify each one in your contract; generic summaries are no substitute.
Least-integrated first. Move the vendor that only does one shallow job — the easiest to replace and the least risky to test — and use that migration to prove your export process works. Save the deeply embedded provider, the one your whole product routes through, for last, when your team has already made the mistakes on the easy ones.
At least yearly, and immediately after any trigger event: a price change, a model deprecation announcement, a terms-of-service update, or a new integration that deepens the dependency. TermsWatch automates the terms-monitoring part of that review.
Lock-in is a security dependency. When you cannot leave a vendor, you cannot respond to their breach, their price hike, or their quietly weakened model — every incident becomes a negotiation instead of a migration. Exit planning is incident-response preparedness: exported data, neutral formats, and tested migration paths turn a vendor compromise from an existential event into a routine switch.
Keep de-risking your AI stack: