Nobody plans to be locked in. It happens through accumulation: three years of pipeline steps, project mappings, policy configuration, dashboards, and muscle memory shaped around one vendor's model. By the time pricing or capability makes a switch attractive, the migration cost is the vendor's best retention tool.
Where switching costs actually live
- Hundreds of pipelines invoking vendor-specific tasks with vendor-specific parameters.
- Policies expressed in the vendor's threshold model.
- Posture history and dashboards in the vendor's schema.
- Integrations and runbooks written against the vendor's API.
The neutral-layer principle
Every place your organization touches the scanner through a neutral abstraction is a place migration becomes configuration instead of surgery. Estate inventory, enrollment state, severity normalization, policy evaluation, and audit history all belong to you, not to the scanner — if the layer that owns them is provider-neutral.
Kangl's position
Kangl models providers behind a neutral operating contract: connection, mapping, provisioning, delivery mechanisms such as pipeline injection and PR gates, posture sync, and policy. Snyk is the production-supported provider today; the contract is what the ecosystem grows on. Your policies, inventory, and audit history stay in the control plane — whatever engine does the scanning.
