Big Tech Dependency Evaluation

The Big Tech Dependency Evaluation is a research tool developed by the Journalism Relay Project to help news organizations and individuals understand how much of their daily tech infrastructure is controlled by a small number of dominant companies.

This tool maps your tech choices against a landscape of concentrated power — measuring not whether your tools are "good" or "bad," but how vulnerable your operations are to decisions made by entities you don't control. One example: migrating from a proprietary platform to an open-source alternative might seem like a small change, but it can significantly reduce your dependency on Big Tech companies. At the same time, you data may still be controlled and held by those companies, making it hard or expensive to migrate elsewhere.

Once you see where the dependencies are, you can begin making informed decisions about diversification.

Why is this relevant?

This tool measures structural dependency, it is not our point to make ethical judgments. A high score doesn't mean your choices are wrong, but it can mean that your tech operations are concentrated in companies that hold too much power, potentially generating higher costs, high dependency and low migration capabilities. The scoring is deliberately simple and the results are showed transparently, and it does not attempt to weight categories differently or account for how critical each category is to your specific operations. We encourage you to use the detailed breakdown alongside the headline number.

We encourage you to give us feedback so we can keep improving the tool.

1. What the Dependency Index measures

The Dependency Index is a 0–100 scale that measures how concentrated your tech stack is among dominant technology companies. A score of 0 (theoretical minimum) means complete independence (every tool you use is open-source or from a small independent provider), and 100 means total dependency (every tool is from a top-tier Big Tech company).

The index is calculated per category and then averaged — so it measures the intensity of your dependency, not simply how many tools you use. For instance, someone who uses 30 services, all from independent providers, will score lower than someone who uses 10 services, all from Google and Microsoft.

2. How the score is calculated

Each provider in our database is assigned a dependency weight from 0 to 5, based primarily on their market capitalization or reported valuation as of February 16, 2026. The higher a company's market cap, the greater its concentration of power, and the higher its weight:

For each category where you selected at least one tool (or typed an alternative in the "Other" field), we compute a category dependency ratio:

The final Dependency Index is the average of all answered category ratios, scaled to 0–100:

Only categories where you made at least one selection (checkbox or "Other" text) contribute to the index. Skipped categories are not penalized.

3. Interpreting your score

4. Why market cap?

Market capitalization and estimated valuation are imperfect but measurable and objective figures to evaluate the relative size and influence of companies. Companies with larger market caps tend to have broader data collection capabilities, greater influence over digital infrastructure, more aggressive acquisition strategies, and more leverage over the ecosystems that journalists depend on. It is a starting point — future versions of this methodology may incorporate additional signals such as data access scope, regulatory capture, and ecosystem lock-in.