Vendor Lock-In

Vendor lock-in is what you discover on the day you decide to leave a supplier. Everything still works and the invoices still go out, so nothing feels wrong until you ask for your things back. Then you find out how few of them are actually yours. That is rarely written into the contract, because it is usually just the way the arrangement grew over the years.

Four things are worth separating in your head, because most people treat them as one thing. Your data is the customer list, the orders and the history, so you should be able to pull it out as a plain spreadsheet whenever you like. Nobody should have to ask permission for that. The code is the software itself, and whether you own it depends on what you paid for, so that line in the contract deserves a slow read. The domain name is your address on the internet, which is why it should sit in your company name with your own email on it. The hosting account is where the site actually lives, and its invoice should carry your name too.

The one that surprises people most is the domain. A small agency registers it for the client using the agency's own email address, and five years later that agency has closed or the relationship has soured. Getting the name back can then take months, and until it comes back, every business card you have printed points at a site you no longer control.

So ask four questions before you sign anything. The first is whether you can export all your own data yourself, and in what format. The second is whether you own the source code or are only renting it, and the third is whether the domain and hosting sit in your company name. The fourth is the one people forget, which is what moving to another supplier next year would cost you, in money and in working days. A supplier who answers all four plainly is already telling you how he means to behave later.

Linkysoft answers those four in writing at the start of every web application project, because a client who stays by choice is worth far more than one who stays because leaving would hurt. That is also why accounts on Hostrena hosting are opened in the client's own name rather than ours. Leaving Linkysoft should always be possible, and our whole job is to make sure it never becomes necessary.