Flexible, customizable, sticky: 3 words that mean nothing

Ask a software company what makes them different and a familiar set of answers comes back. We are more flexible. We customize to the client. We are easier to work with. Our support is better. Customers stay because they are embedded.

The problem is not that these are false. It is that a differentiator has to be a claim a competitor cannot also make, and these are claims any competitor can make and none can be tested against. They are not lies. They are just not information.

They can also be the same fact as a cost. Consider a company describing itself as highly configurable, positioned against rigid incumbents. Configurability is real, and it can also be why implementation runs 5 months instead of 6 weeks, why every customer sits on a slightly different version, and why support hours per account run well above what the category would predict. The differentiator and the cost structure are one thing seen from two ends. That is worth establishing before you price the business.

Stickiness is the one that can be tested

Stickiness means switching cost, and switching cost leaves evidence in public.

Read the documentation. A product with deep bidirectional integrations, a documented data model and no export path is genuinely hard to leave. A product whose entire integration story is a single connector to a general-purpose automation tool is not, whatever the deck says.

Read the API and export documentation specifically. A vendor that publishes a complete data export is confident. A vendor with no documented export path has switching costs of a kind, but the kind that generates resentment rather than loyalty, and that is a different asset with a different half-life.

Read the contracts if you can see any. Auto-renewal with a long notice period is a commercial lock rather than a product lock, and it converts into churn the moment a buyer pays attention to it.

Read the change logs. A product that has shipped nothing structural in 2 years may not be sticky so much as tolerated, and tolerance ends when a procurement cycle notices it.

Where the market context cuts

Pricing structure and switching cost are related, and the structure has been moving. Kyle Poyar’s 2026 State of B2B Monetization, a survey of 230 software and AI companies, found hybrid pricing now the most common primary structure at 37%, up from 25% a year earlier, with investors preferring hybrid, outcome and usage models over seat-based by a wide margin.

That matters for a stickiness claim because consumption-weighted pricing is, structurally, easier to walk away from than a seat commitment: usage falls before a contract ends. It does not follow that every company moving that way is weakening its position, and plenty have deepened integration at the same time. It does follow that a retention number produced under one pricing structure is not evidence about a base that is being moved to another.

What to do with this

Treat every differentiation claim as a hypothesis with an owner. If the claim is flexibility, the test is implementation time and support cost per account. If the claim is stickiness, the test is integration depth, export availability and contract structure. If the claim survives, it is worth paying for. If it does not, the price should reflect a business competing on relationships rather than on product.

This is all observable before exclusivity, which makes it the cheapest commercial question in the deal to answer.