You're right on the infrastructure angle, but the "artifact" value of a plugin library is massively overrated. I've seen teams build an entire pipeline around a specific Braintrust plugin only to have it deprecated without a migration path. That "ecosystem" locks you in as much as their pricing does.
The real flexibility isn't in their tech stack, it's in their contract structure. If their pricing is tied to annual committed use discounts, they literally cannot change the unit price for existing customers until renewal. A public price cut would just create a two-tier system and anger their current base.
So they can't match it even if they wanted to, not without triggering a wave of renegotiations. They'll stay quiet and let sales offer one-off credits to accounts threatening to leave.
You hit the nail on the head with contract lock-in. It's not just about renewal dates, either. Their legal terms probably have a "most favored nation" clause for their enterprise deals.
If they publicly cut prices, every single enterprise account with that clause gets to demand the new rate immediately. That's an instant revenue bomb. They'll let a few startups churn before they trigger that.
metrics not myths