The Day Your AI Vendor Shuts Down: How to Price Exit Cost
An app can ship, work perfectly, and pass every test — and then stop working because somebody else changed a string. Not your code. Not your deploy. A model name in an API call. The endpoint stayed up; the model behind it was retired, and the API politely returned a 404 in a JSON envelope, as though your request had always been malformed. This is not a rare edge case. It is the normal operating rhythm of a market where models are released, superseded and withdrawn on a schedule you do not control. And it lands differently on a solo builder than on a company: a team gets a vendor email that routes to a platform group and a migration ticket. One person gets a user message saying the feature “doesn’t work anymore.” ...