Locked-in storefront owners hit with annual price hikes and disappearing support, with no leverage, no visibility, and no safe exit ramp

Summary

Owners of mature, non-trivial storefronts (digital product stores with custom backend purchase flows, download links, and account logins) find themselves on a treadmill: the platform raises subscription prices every single year while support degrades to 'basically non-existent.' They are not price-sensitive — the business is profitable and they would happily pay more for a better platform — yet they stay trapped because the only apparent path out is a full rebuild of the storefront, the subscription setup, the download delivery, and the customer account system. So they endure the increases and the lack of support rather than risk months of unbillable reconstruction. The unsolved gap is twofold: (1) there is no independent, ongoing signal that tells an owner whether their current platform is still worth the rising cost (reliability, support responsiveness, hidden risks, what would actually break), and (2) there is no trustworthy pre-commitment assessment of what a migration would actually cost in hours and risk before they pull the trigger. Platform-side 'migration tools' only copy static layout, and agencies quote blind. The result is years of quiet overpayment, accumulating platform risk, and a decision that gets scarier every year it is deferred — a high-value, largely unaddressed pain for the long tail of self-managed SMB storefronts.