Your company signed up for AWS or Azure because it was easier than thinking about infrastructure. Fair. Same reason I signed up for every streaming service in 2020 and now pay $340 a month to watch the same three shows. The convenience felt free. It was not.
A recent survey from Reach found that 73% of business leaders report hidden costs from cloud lock-in, and those costs push spending up by 35% on average. Not 35% more than competitors. 35% more than the company itself budgeted. Two-thirds are paying for extra tools or workarounds just to function inside the ecosystem they already pay for. Only 16% say they're satisfied with the arrangement. That's a worse satisfaction rate than most airline loyalty programs.
The Comfort of the Cage
The pitch for all-in with a single cloud provider is real, I'll give it that. One bill, one support line, one set of APIs your engineers already know. That is genuinely less friction, especially for smaller teams. But Sam Ranieri, whose company published the Reach research, put it plainly: what looks simple at the outset can limit flexibility and increase tech debt as businesses grow. The cage is comfortable until you need to move.
And 68% of companies say lock-in is already slowing their growth. Not theoretically. Now. Sixty-five percent believe they'd earn more revenue without it. That's not a rounding error, that's a strategic handicap hiding inside an invoice.
The 5-year math is where things get genuinely alarming. Cloud costs can run 2 to 3 times higher than owning your infrastructure over that window, according to a 2026 Aptly Technology analysis. Building your own data center runs roughly $11.3 million per megawatt globally, which is a terrifying number upfront. But the cloud alternative is paying that money anyway, slowly, in increments designed to feel manageable until suddenly they don't.
AI Just Made the Exit Harder
Here's where it gets worse. AI workloads are the new anchor keeping companies in place. AI-optimized data centers now cost over $20 million per megawatt to build, so the providers with existing chip access and compute infrastructure have massive leverage. AWS revenue is projected to hit $600 billion by 2036, driven almost entirely by AI demand. They are not building that future by making it easy for you to leave.
SUSE's Cloud and AI Pulse Survey from March 19 found that 39% of U.S. enterprises are specifically focused on reducing vendor dependency, nearly double the global average of 25%. Half call it a critical issue. American companies feel this more acutely, probably because U.S. tech investment is deep enough that the lock-in math actually shows up in earnings reviews.
The practical exit is hybrid cloud, and most companies already know it. Fifty-nine percent are prioritizing hybrid setups, and 51% plan to increase multi-cloud spending. That's the right call. Spread compute across providers, keep sensitive workloads on owned infrastructure where costs allow, and treat any single cloud vendor the way you'd treat a landlord who controls your only exit: politely, but with a backup plan.
Your IT team needs a real migration cost analysis on the table before the next contract renewal, not after. The switching pain is real: 38% of companies fear downtime from moving, 36% cite high migration costs. Those fears are legitimate. But the alternative is paying a 35% premium forever, on a platform that just got more expensive because their GPU costs went up.
Thirty-five percent more, compounding, with no exit in sight. That's not a cloud bill. That's a hostage situation with a monthly payment plan.
