Switching costs
Also known as: Customer lock-in, Vendor lock-in
Switching costs are the money, time, effort, or risk a customer would have to spend to leave one product or vendor for a competitor. The higher these costs, the harder it is for a customer to leave even if a cheaper or better alternative exists.
They can be financial (cancellation fees, the cost of new hardware or licenses), operational (retraining staff, migrating data, rebuilding workflows built around one tool), or contractual (multi-year agreements). In enterprise software especially, a company's tools become embedded in daily workflows and file formats, so replacing them means disrupting the entire business, not just swapping one app for another.
High switching costs are one of the most common sources of a moat. They let a company retain customers and raise prices over time without losing much business, since the pain of switching often outweighs the savings a competitor offers.