Software teams rarely decide to become platform-dependent. Dependency accumulates one convenient decision at a time: identity here, distribution there, analytics somewhere else, and a proprietary workflow connecting the pieces.
Convenience has a half-life
A managed service can be exactly the right decision. The risk appears when the product cannot distinguish between a replaceable supplier and a system that now owns a critical part of the customer relationship.
Dependency is therefore less about how many vendors a team uses and more about how expensive it would be to change direction.
Exit paths are architecture
Teams often document disaster recovery but not strategic recovery. Can subscriber data be exported? Can content be rendered elsewhere? Can payment records be reconciled without one dashboard? Can the domain move without changing the product identity?
These questions sound conservative until a pricing or policy change makes them urgent.
Dependency audit
Use platforms deliberately
The answer is not to self-host everything. It is to preserve useful boundaries. Commodity services are valuable precisely because they can be swapped without rewriting the business.
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