Switching costs are everything a customer must spend to move from your product to an alternative, counting money, time, risk, and disruption. They set the size of the advantage a competitor needs before leaving becomes worth it.

They come from several places and behave differently by source. Financial costs are the visible ones: migration fees, new equipment, contractual exit terms. Procedural costs are the hours spent retraining people and rebuilding process. Relational costs are the accumulated knowledge in an account team that a replacement starts without. Technical costs, integrations, data formats, certification, tend to be the most durable, because they cannot be argued away in a negotiation.

What matters in B2B is not the cost you can calculate but the one the buyer believes exists. The person weighing the switch is also weighing the career consequence of a migration that goes badly, and that risk premium sits on top of every line in the model. Buyers routinely stay put over a gap far larger than the arithmetic says they should.

For pricing, switching costs are the raw material of pricing power, and they are frequently the only thing holding a price that the value alone would not support. That is worth knowing about your own book, because a price defended by lock-in rather than by value is a price waiting for a competitor to reduce the friction.

The trap is spending them. Every price increase draws down the same balance, and once the accumulated increases exceed what leaving costs, the account moves and the churn arrives without warning. Reach out to Acustrategy to learn whether your prices are earned or merely tolerated.