Plenty of software sold to small and mid-size companies is sold on terms where the vendor quietly keeps the parts that matter. Not fraudulently — it is in the contract. It is just that nobody reads that clause until the relationship ends.
The test
If you stopped working with your software partner tomorrow, what would you still have?
If the answer is a login that expires, you did not buy software. You rented access to it, at a price that was quoted as though you were buying.
Four things worth checking in your own contracts
- Who owns the intellectual property — and whether the same build can be resold to a competitor
- Whose name the mobile apps are published under, and who controls that developer account
- Whose cloud project the data sits in, and whether you can get administrative access to it today
- Whether handover to another team is a listed deliverable or a favour you would have to ask for
The last one is the real test. A vendor confident about the first three will put handover in writing without being pushed. One that hesitates has told you the answer.
Why we do it the other way
Partly principle, mostly because it makes us better. If a customer can leave at any point with everything they paid for, the only thing keeping them is that the work is good. That is a more honest position to negotiate from, and it means we never get to coast on lock-in.
The same idea runs through our AI work: knowledge is held as plain text files the customer already has a copy of. There is no export process, because there is nothing to export.