AI ECONOMICS · MIGRATION COST
LLM Vendor Lock-In Cost
How much does it really cost to migrate off your current LLM provider? Engineering hours, downtime, and payback at a new vendor's price.
Result
Switching Cost Breakdown
Engineering hours and downtime add up to total cost-of-migration.
How to use it
- Enter your current monthly LLM spend, your prompt complexity on a 0-10 scale, the size of your eval suite, the engineering hours you expect retraining and reintegration to take, the days of downtime during the switch, your hourly engineering cost, and any discount the new vendor offers. Prompt complexity and eval-suite size drive the rewrite estimate, because the more your prompts are tuned to one model's quirks, the more engineering it takes to make them work on another.
- Read the prompt-rewrite hours, eval-rewrite hours, total engineering hours, the engineering dollar cost, the downtime opportunity cost, the total switching cost, how many months of current spend that equals, the monthly savings at the new vendor's discount, and the payback period in months. The total switching cost is the real price of the migration, and the months-of-spend figure puts it in terms you already understand.
- Use the payback period as the decision gate. If a 30% discount takes years to repay the switching cost, the lock-in is effectively permanent and the discount is a distraction; if it pays back in a few months, the migration is worth scheduling. This reframes vendor choice from a sticker-price comparison into a real return-on-investment question.
- Treat the engineering and downtime estimates as the part most teams underestimate. Prompts that were tuned over months, evals that encode hard-won edge cases, and the revenue lost during a cutover are all real costs that a headline price-per-token comparison ignores entirely. Model a pessimistic case with more rewrite hours and an extra day of downtime to see how quickly the payback period stretches.
- Re-run whenever a vendor changes pricing or a new model makes switching tempting, and use the output to negotiate. Knowing your true switching cost is leverage with your current vendor, since the discount a competitor must offer to clear your payback hurdle is exactly the number your incumbent has to beat to keep you.
Questions people usually ask
What decision is LLM Vendor Lock-In Cost designed for?
LLM Vendor Lock-In Cost helps teams engineering, downtime, and payback when migrating between llm providers. before committing budget, pricing, or operating changes.
How can I get decision-grade output quality?
Use validated baseline numbers, run downside and upside scenarios, and align assumptions with your real cadence and constraints.
Is this legal, tax, or accounting advice?
No. Outputs are business planning estimates and should be reviewed with qualified professionals when required.
Is this free and private?
Yes. Tools run client-side in your browser with no signup.
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Precomputed reference table
Skip the inputs: this tool's engine also powers a full reference grid you can cite or download as CSV.
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