Whose coordination cost is falling faster — yours, or theirs?

Firms exist because coordinating inside is cheaper than transacting outside. That gap is where a services business lives. Your costs falling is good for you. Your counterparty's costs falling is not — and the two are moving at different speeds for every category of work.

Transaction Cost Canvas
Cost component
Inside the firm — what it costs us to coordinate this ourselves
Through the market — what it costs to find and buy it
Direction over 24 months
Search
Finding who can do the work at all
Verification
Establishing whether they are any good
Bargaining
Agreeing scope, price and terms
Monitoring
Knowing whether it is actually being done
Enforcement
Doing something when it goes wrong. Usually the stickiest.

The asymmetry — the only question this canvas exists to answer

Where does the line sit today?
Which way is it moving, and how fast?

If you sell this work: a line near the boundary and moving toward make means your client is approaching the point of doing it themselves. Not because they got better at the work — because supervising it got cheap. If you buy this work: the same reading is your in-sourcing signal.

Both canvases are released under CC BY-SA 4.0. Use them, adapt them, teach them, charge for facilitating them. Attribution required; derivatives stay open. Companions to Building an AI-Native Company and the AI-Native Score.