Li: API and infrastructure products have much higher switching costs than SaaS
Jennifer Li · The Future of Software Development - Vibe Coding, Prompt Engineering & AI Assistants · Jul 21, 2025 · at 28:07
Jennifer Li, partner at a16z, explains why infrastructure software and API providers maintain strong customer stickiness despite appearing easily replaceable.
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“It just turns out, in general, the switching cost of infrastructure piece is so much higher. Even with like API business, people tend to think you can just like switch over to another API. There's so much logic embedded in Calling the API in the software itself. Like, there's a lot more switching costs compared to, you know, your regular SaaS software consumer software.”
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