Vendor-Trust Collapse

Pattern: Token-burn or credit-burn pricing models where the vendor profits when the customer stops checking the bill.

Evidence: Replit, Lovable, Base44; one Lovable templates module showed a 22.6% revert rate across 452 commits. Replit President Michele Catasta posted on r/replit that "predicting the estimated cost is a very hard technical problem. We don't do it today not because we don't want to, but because the estimates would be wildly inaccurate."

Diagnostic: Question 1 (Seven Questions): Is your pricing tied to volume, or to correct outcomes?

Pattern: Action-metered pricing on integration tooling, where per-touch cost is unknowable until after the touch fires.

Evidence: Clay jumped from $185 to $495 per seat in early 2026 and shifted to an Action-metered HTTP API model. The motion-design tools downstream (HeyReach, Apollo, Lemlist, La Growth Machine, Amplemarket) hit a 40% year-on-year LinkedIn ban rate per r/GTMbuilders.

Diagnostic: Question 2 (Seven Questions): Where is the audit trail, and what does it record?

Pattern: Third-party AI automation tools getting banned, suspended, or rate-limited by the platforms they depend on. Vendor disclosure of these events is voluntary; the incentive to disclose is zero.

Evidence: LinkedIn 40% YoY ban rate of HeyReach / Apollo / Lemlist / La Growth Machine / Amplemarket. Documented on r/GTMbuilders by `Material_Hospital_68`. Operators kept buying into the AI-SDR stack on the assumption that the platform would tolerate the volume. It did not.

Diagnostic: Question 3 (Seven Questions): When did your platform last get banned, suspended, or rate-limited by a partner?

Pattern: Service vendors substituting AI for skilled labour and pocketing the margin difference, often degrading output quality in the process.

Evidence: r/content_marketing carried four named cases in 2026: a designer who quit when their agency forced AI creative on a premium client, a 5-person ad agency that laid off 2 of 5 because only one person knew the AI workflow, a 12-year content writer whose career feels over, and an agency that almost lost a premium-skincare client when AI artefacts in product images slipped through QC. One agency lead said the quiet part out loud: "we won't work with any agencies using AI for creative and are willing to pay 50% more for creative services that don't use AI."

Diagnostic: Question 4 (Seven Questions): Are you the substitute for an employee, or the supplement to one?

Pattern: Executive-level enthusiasm replacing judgment. The decision-maker stops checking outputs because the model produced them.

Evidence: r/marketing post #24 (⬆426, 223 comments) is the cleanest articulation. `asp821`: "I have a client like this. ChatGPTs everything to death until there's nothing memorable about it." `Logical_Bite3221`: "Boomer, obsessed with AI, Microsoft, and def got on the AI bandwagon verrrry late and wants us to use it for everything so that it can be tracked and we are teaching it how to do our jobs so we can be laid off soon."

Diagnostic: Question 4 (Seven Questions): same — substitute vs supplement, this time at the executive layer.

Pattern: Established platform vendors extracting customer value through forced licence changes, captive pricing, or bundled AI features the customer never asked for.

Evidence: r/sysadmin's top post of the year hit ⬆9,196, the largest single thread engagement of any operator sub sampled all year. Broadcom and VMware: "Your licenses expire today and you will face environment disruptions as well as penalty fees" against perpetual licences, captured by `MeridianNL` as "you got upgraded from 'customer' to 'hostage'." GitHub Actions per-minute self-hosted runner fees added close to $3,500 a month extra. Atlassian force-bundling Rovo; Microsoft layering Copilot across every product. `Just_the_nicest_guy`: "the enshittification will continue until profits improve."

Diagnostic: Question 5 (Seven Questions): What happens when our incumbent vendor enshittifies?

Pattern: High-budget AI transformation programmes delivering a thin wrapper over commodity LLM APIs. The audit trail is decorative; the outputs are not replayable.

Evidence: r/sysadmin #22 (⬆2,326), r/devops #7 (⬆1,126), and r/ITManagers #14 + #25 each named it independently. `bigbadrune` on r/sysadmin: "our 'ai transformation' cost seven figures and delivered a chatgpt wrapper... literally a system prompt that says 'you are a helpful assistant for [company name]'. same hallucinations, same limitations, except now it confidently makes up internal policies that don't exist and everyone in leadership thinks the issue is that we need to 'prompt engineer better'."

Diagnostic: Question 6 + Question 7 (Seven Questions): production-customer 18-month test, and audit-evidence test.