Platform Exit Cost Curve

Platform exit cost is the total price of moving a client app off a builder once it is live: rebuilding screens, migrating the hosted database, re-registering push certificates, and resubmitting to both app stores. That cost rises with how deeply the platform owns the stack, not with how fast the first build shipped. A drag-and-drop canvas plus a hosted Postgres layer, as Adalo provides, means the data model itself must be exported and rebuilt elsewhere. A webview wrapper such as Median or MobiLoud keeps the client's existing site as the source of truth, so the app is a rendering layer and the exit is comparatively cheap. Agencies should price retainers against this curve: quote the build, then quote the migration separately, because a client who wants to leave in month nine will ask for that number.