Eight questions that measure how much of your operation depends on a single vendor, and how expensive that dependency would be to unwind if you ever had to.
Score one vendor relationship at a time: the one your renewal, incident or budget review has put in front of you. Fixed points, the same result every time, nothing stored.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Selected senior operators who have negotiated both sides of deep vendor relationships can review your exposure confidentially before the renewal.
Get independent perspectivesAnswer for one specific vendor relationship as it stands today, not as the contract describes it.
On these answers the relationship is healthy dependency rather than exposure: alternatives exist, data is portable and the vendor cannot reprice you against a wall. Positions like this are usually inherited rather than designed, which means they can erode without anyone deciding anything.
Real dependency has formed: the vendor sits inside a core process, switching would cost months, and some contractual protections have not kept pace with how embedded the relationship became. Nothing about this is unusual, which is exactly the problem. Concentration at this level is normal right up until the renewal, the price rise or the outage.
This vendor can now materially affect your operations, your costs or both, and knows it. At this level the relationship has outgrown procurement and belongs on the risk register, alongside the other things that could stop the organisation.
No one signs a contract titled critical dependency. Concentration accretes: a module added because integration was easy, a second process migrated during a cost review, a renewal extended for a discount. Each step is locally rational, and the sum is a vendor no one chose to depend on. The score exists to see the sum, because the organisation only ever saw the steps.
A vendor relationship reveals its true balance of power at renewal. If the vendor knows you cannot leave, the negotiation is a formality with meetings attached. The paradox of exit planning is that its value peaks when it is never used: a tested exit path changes renewal pricing even if you stay for a decade.
Eight answers at 0, 5 or 10 points, normalised to 100, where higher means deeper dependency. Score your top vendors annually and watch the movement: a rising score across renewals is the clearest early warning this tool produces, and it is invisible in any single year's snapshot.
No. Deep partnerships can be efficient, and fragmenting critical processes across many vendors has costs of its own. The problem is unpriced concentration: dependency the organisation never chose, never measured and never bought protections against. The score makes the choice explicit.
Stability answers one question out of eight. Large vendors rarely disappear, but they reprice, retire products, change licensing models and get acquired. Financial visibility protects you against failure; the other seven questions protect you against everything else.
Then the work is to make the dependency safe rather than to end it: contractual protections at renewal, verified data extraction, influence over the vendor's roadmap, and a priced view of what partial alternatives would cost. Captivity you manage is a strategy; captivity you ignore is a countdown.