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Infrastructure Lock-In and Switching Costs

A hospital that runs Passepartout with HIPAA gate rules ($50K/yr) for five years has accumulated:

  • A fact store with a decade of compliance decisions
  • A proof forest of verified rules
  • An empirical decision history tied to their specific deployment
  • Customized gate rules encoding their specific workflows and approvals

Switching to a competitor means discarding all of it. The accumulated value grows as the fact store deepens. Annual revenue per enterprise grows from $250K in year one to $500K-$1M by year five as more domain packages are added.

This is the strongest residual moat. The id:45258a2d-1675-562c-9024-5d1eb2f1ea56 (see the Social protocol infrastructure requirements for the network topology that creates this lock-in)]] (regression suite) is a close second — it grows with every deployment and cannot be ingested from public data. The verification monopoly and upgrade lifecycle compound this lock-in: every new regulation encoded as a gate rule deepens the proof forest, making the deployment harder to reproduce elsewhere.