The Real Cost of Switching Vendors Every Two Years
The invoice is not the expensive part. The expensive part is losing the context someone had already built up about your business.
Switching vendors is usually justified on price: a new quote comes in lower, or an existing relationship feels stale, so the business moves. The invoice comparison is real, but it is rarely the whole cost.
A vendor who has worked with a business for a few years accumulates something a fresh quote cannot include: which reports actually get read, which past changes broke something and why, which shortcuts are safe and which are landmines. None of that is written down anywhere. It lives in the relationship, and switching resets it to zero.
This is not an argument for staying with a bad vendor out of inertia — a relationship that has stopped improving or stopped being responsive should end. It is an argument for weighing the restart cost honestly against the savings, rather than treating a lower quote as automatically the cheaper choice.