Flexible, customizable, sticky: three words that mean nothing
Flexibility and customization are not differentiators, because every competitor claims them and none can be disproved. Stickiness is a claim about switching cost, and switching cost is measurable from outside the company. This is how to tell a real moat from a well-phrased one.
Ask a software company what makes them different and a predictable 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.
None of these are differentiators. A differentiator is a claim a competitor cannot also make, and every one of those sentences appears verbatim on the website of the nearest three companies in the category. They are not lies. They are just not information.
Consider a company describing itself as highly configurable, positioned against rigid incumbents. Configurability is real, and it is also why implementation runs five months instead of six weeks, why every customer is on a slightly different version, and why the support burden per account is triple the category norm. The differentiator and the cost structure are the same fact seen from two ends. That is worth knowing before you price the business.
Stickiness is the one that can actually be tested
Stickiness means switching costs, and switching costs leave 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 Zapier connector 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, but the kind that generate resentment rather than loyalty, and that is a different asset.
Read the contracts if you can see any. Auto-renewal with a long notice period is a commercial lock, not a product lock, and it converts into churn the moment a buyer pays attention.
Read the change logs. A product that has shipped nothing structural in two years is not sticky, it is tolerated, and tolerance ends when a procurement cycle notices it.
The market context matters here. Buyers are getting more hostile to lock-in, not less, and the pricing shift underneath it is visible: the 2026 Stripo research across more than a thousand B2B SaaS companies found per-seat pricing still the most common model at roughly 58 percent, but usage-based options now offered by 42 percent of products, up from 27 percent in 2023. Usage-based buying is, structurally, easier to walk away from. A base that is migrating toward consumption pricing is a base with falling switching costs, whatever the retention number currently says.
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. 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.
More teardowns
Nobody can state the ROI, so nobody can defend the price
A company that cannot express what its product is worth in the customer's own numbers will discount under pressure, lose renewals it should win, and never raise prices. This is one of the most tractable problems in the first hundred days after an acquisition.
Pricing built before the market changed
Most software companies at this size price per seat, on a model set years ago. Buyers increasingly want to pay for consumption or for outcomes, and investors increasingly prefer it. Moving is valuable and moving carelessly transfers real risk onto the vendor.
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