I dunno, this describes my reality pretty accurately. Apple, Figma, and Adobe all try to lock you in with cloud storage and proprietary storage formats: the more you invest in their products, the more you'd lose by not paying them. I used to run some websites off Squarespace, and there's no way to export them and move somewhere else, so you end up paying ~$200 a year to host a static web page, else recreate it from scratch. Gmail has me locked in by having all my emails from the last twenty years. Slack owns my conversation history with my friends. And so on...

> those that do often have extremely valuable products.

I agree with that. All those products above are valuable and useful to me. But, the price is not commensurate with the value of the product alone. The price only makes sense when you add both the value I get from using the product and the pain I would experience by not using the product anymore. The product developers work hard not only to make the product useful, but also to punish you if you leave. That's the gross part.