Retention Gravity Index

Retention Gravity Index measures how much a client's document history, signed contracts, and shared folders pull against any future platform switch. The heavier the archive, the more a tool choice becomes a multi-year commitment rather than a monthly line item. Agencies feel this most at offboarding: a client with three years of signed statements of work inside one vendor's audit trail is far harder to move than one whose contracts live as PDFs in a neutral folder. The index rises with file volume, signature history, permission graphs, and integration depth. A practical counterweight is keeping the canonical copy in a storage layer that any editor or signer can reach, then treating the signing tool as a temporary execution surface. Dropbox Sign and DocHub both illustrate the split: signing happens in the tool, but the durable record can live in Dropbox or Google Drive, which keeps the switching cost from compounding with every renewal.