The EU Data Act and the End of Switching Fees: Cloud Switching Becomes Mandatory
Since September 2025 the Data Act's switching rules apply to new cloud contracts, and in January 2027 the fee ban takes effect. Why changing providers turns from a negotiation point into a legal right, and what that means for architecture.
Vendor lock-in was long a commercial lever: anyone wanting to leave paid for the exit, fought proprietary formats and lost weeks to migration work. The EU Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) reverses that logic. The regulation has applied since 12 September 2025, and its Chapter VI turns switching cloud providers into an enforceable customer right.
What has applied since September 2025
Providers of data processing services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) must remove every obstacle that makes switching harder: pre-commercial, commercial, technical, contractual and organisational barriers alike. In practice this means a maximum notice period of two months, a 30-day transition window for the actual move (extendable to up to seven months where technically unfeasible) and the right to take data and digital assets along. For new contracts these duties already apply.
The fee brake until January 2027
The Data Act phases out switching charges. On 12 January 2027 the full ban takes hold: no charges may then be levied for switching between data processing services. By 12 September 2027, legacy B2B contracts must also be cleared of unfair terms. Anyone who built pricing and contract models on exit costs will lose that foundation on a foreseeable schedule.
Switching is more than a data export
The practical sticking point is functional equivalence. Exporting raw data is not enough if the target environment cannot do anything with it. The Data Act calls for open interfaces and, where possible, common formats so that a service can run again at its destination. Three questions decide in practice whether a switch is genuinely workable:
- Data model: Are contents held in documented, open structures, or in a proprietary schema?
- Interfaces: Are there stable, versioned APIs to export both live and historical data?
- Metadata: Do configuration, permissions and processing logic travel along, or stay behind in the old system?
What this means for architecture
Sovereignty here is not a checkbox but a property of the system design. Whoever considers portability only at the moment of departure has already lost it. Open data models, documented export paths and hosting within the European legal area not only reduce lock-in risk, they are increasingly the precondition for meeting the Data Act duties at all. In a suite that holds its modules together through open interfaces and hosting in Frankfurt, changing providers is not a threat scenario but a traceable procedure.
The Data Act does not ask whether you want to keep your customers. It asks whether they could leave if they wanted to.