Choose Your Controls: The Hidden Cost of Convenience

In an era shaped by AI, automation, and cloud-native platforms, the tradeoff between owning and renting control systems is no longer abstract—it’s operationally, strategically, and financially urgent. Control feels costly—until the price of relinquishing it becomes painfully clear.

As Drew Lyton compellingly argues in The Future Is Not Self-Hosted, the web’s critical infrastructure is increasingly centralizing—not out of necessity, but convenience. The price of control, he notes, is steep. Self-hosting isn’t merely a technical burden; it’s a tax on your time, your attention, and your team’s complexity budget. This drives our default to platforms, abstractions, APIs, and SaaS—anything to reduce surface area.

And often, that’s a rational decision. But it’s never a free one.

🔧 Sometimes Control Is Cheap—and Undervalued

In large infrastructure projects, fundamental control systems—like SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), which monitor and operate industrial processes—may represent just 0.7% of total CAPEX. Yet their impact is enormous: a single remote reset can prevent a truck roll or avoid downtime costing $9,000+ per incident.

What’s cheap in dollars can be priceless in resilience. When we outsource control, we often forget we’re also outsourcing observability, adaptability, and recovery.

🔄 Vendor Control: The SaaS Awakening

The convenience trap isn’t just theoretical—it’s playing out in real time across enterprise software. According to analysis from The New Stack, enterprise buyers are increasingly ditching multi-year SaaS contracts in favor of shorter, more flexible agreements.

Why? Because they’ve learned the hidden cost of outsourcing procurement decisions to vendors.

Multi-year contracts promised simplicity: lock in pricing, reduce negotiation overhead, and let vendors manage the roadmap. But when conditions changed, companies found themselves trapped by rigid tools misaligned with evolving needs.

The pandemic accelerated this awakening. Organizations locked into inflexible contracts struggled to adapt, while agile competitors—those with optionality—pivoted and thrived.

Consider the companies now discovering that their “simple” ChatGPT integrations can’t be easily switched to Claude or Gemini when needs change. What felt like a quick AI win became vendor lock-in by another name.

As one procurement executive noted: “We realized we were paying for predictability in an unpredictable world. The ‘discount’ for multi-year commitments wasn’t worth the loss of flexibility.”

This shift reflects a broader recognition: in fast-moving markets, the ability to change course quickly often outweighs the operational simplicity of vendor lock-in.

⚖️ Perfection Isn’t Free—And Might Not Be Worth It

Even when we do seek control, we often pursue it too far, mistaking more control for better outcomes. As one management study aptly put it:

“The last 10% of perfection can cost 40% of project budget.”

Insisting on granular control—whether over data flows, campaign targeting, or dev environments—can become a drag on momentum. Are we managing complexity, or feeding it?

⏳ Opportunity Cost Is the Control Tax No One Tracks

Every hour spent auditing model outputs or managing your own LLM instance is an hour not spent with customers or learning from the market. That’s time lost on innovation, market research, or simply better serving your core audience.

The question isn’t just, can we control it? It’s: What are we giving up to do so?

The ability to discern where control matters most is emerging as a key leadership differentiator. In fast-moving environments, it’s not just about speed—it’s about choosing your friction points with intent.

🧠 Control Also Has Cognitive Limits

Psychological research tells us that self-control is a finite resource. So is oversight. The more we try to monitor, optimize, and govern every input or outcome, the more we risk burnout, decision fatigue, and organizational rigidity.

The future won’t be dominated by the most controlling teams. It will be led by those who delegate strategically—and know when not to.

🧪 And Then There’s the Paradox of Measurement

In performance marketing, assigning budget to control groups is essential to measure lift—but it also means holding back some customers from high-performing offers. That’s a cost of clarity—a tradeoff between short-term conversion and long-term confidence.

Measurement is a form of control. So are schemas, OKRs, and governance models. Each layer of instrumentation adds weight—and that weight must be justified.

🌐 Centralized Isn’t Always Evil—It’s Just a Tradeoff

There’s one more form of control worth naming: governance at scale. In contexts like public health, energy infrastructure, or wartime logistics, centralized systems have proven far more adaptive than fragmented, private ones.

In other words, losing control at the individual level can enable resilience at the system level. But again: it’s a tradeoff. And the best tradeoffs are deliberate, not default.

🏛️ When Institutional Control Becomes Individual Agency

Government technology offers a fascinating case study in control dynamics. As Tod Newcombe explores in The Complicated History of Government Technology, federal CIOs often find themselves caught between institutional mandates and operational realities.

Consider the paradox: CIOs envision transformative digital changes but encounter resistance from agency cultures worried about job security. Here, the “control” isn’t just technical—it’s political, cultural, and deeply human. The very people who would benefit from better systems resist them because change feels like loss of control over their work lives.

Yet when institutional control is wielded thoughtfully, it can create entirely new possibilities. The federal government’s sustained funding of academic computer science didn’t just support existing research—it created entire new disciplines. Strategic institutional control enabled individual agency at unprecedented scale.

The lesson for leaders: sometimes the most important control decision isn’t about your immediate systems, but about the conditions that enable others to innovate.

🧭 Choose Where to Control. Not Whether to Control.

The seductive allure of modern platforms lies in their promise to remove the burden of ownership. But they also strip away responsibility—and more crucially, the ability to define the rules.

So when your team opts for convenience, speed, or abstraction, do it with your eyes wide open.

Don’t optimize for control everywhere. But wherever you relinquish it, ensure it’s a conscious decision—not an accidental default.

Before your next platform decision, ask three questions: What am I gaining? What am I giving up? And most importantly—can I change my mind later?

Because every convenience you gain may come at the cost of autonomy, resilience, or future agility.

Madam I’m Adam