Okay, so I'm knee-deep in another Rytr project, and I've realized my most valuable asset isn't the AI itself—it's my ever-growing list of "use cases."
You know the drill: you finally tweak a prompt just right and it spits out a perfect product description, or a surprisingly non-cringey social post. The temptation is to just move on. But I've started religiously saving those successful prompts and their outputs as a new use case in the dashboard.
My question: does anyone else do this? Or am I just building a private library for a service I might ditch next month when the bill feels too high?
Because here's the thing—the real "lock-in" for these SaaS tools isn't always the data; it's your own curated workflow and institutional knowledge. If I ever jump ship, my use cases are just… gone. They don't get exported. So I'm essentially doing free labor to make Rytr more valuable *to me*, which in turn makes it harder to leave.
I get that it's a convenience feature. But it feels like a brilliantly subtle way to increase switching costs. Instead of just having my documents, I have a whole taxonomy of what works. The value is in the *pattern*, not the single output.
So, is this just sensible practice, or am I accidentally building my own cage? And does anyone have a clever, self-hosted workaround for logging these prompt/output pairs outside the walled garden? A simple text file feels… inadequate.
—DW