Plan the exit before you sign up

Before I ask what a tool can do, I ask how you leave it. The answer tells you more about a system than any feature list, and it is cheapest to get before you are in.

The column no comparison table has

Choosing a tool means comparing features. Shop systems, booking tools, CMSs: they all do roughly the same things, and the comparison tables look like it. No table has a column for the day you want out. The price goes up, your business outgrows the tool, or the vendor gets bought and the product turns into something else.

That day shows what you actually bought. Sometimes a tool. Sometimes a lease where your own data is the deposit.

What the law covers

In the EU, cloud services, including software you rent online, have had switching rules since 12 September 2025, under the Data Act. The notice you must give before a switch can be at most two months. The switch itself should normally be done within 30 days, and your data must stay retrievable for at least 30 days after that. From 12 January 2027 the provider may not charge for switching at all.

That is good, and it solves the smaller problem. The law makes sure you get your data. It does not make sure you can do anything with it.

An export is not a move

A spreadsheet of orders is not your shop. Your shop is also the rules behind it: which discount applies when, how shipping is calculated, what happens on a return. Those rules live in settings someone chose once, and in automations clicked together inside a vendor’s interface. Ask how you take those with you. The answer is instructive.

What a system does is rarely in its data. It is in the decisions made while setting it up, and those are surprisingly often written down nowhere. So you do not move. You rebuild, from memory.

Four questions before you sign up

Whose name is it in?

Account, domain, payment provider: in your name, on an email address you own. For a .de domain, the registered holder is the registry’s contractual partner and holds the rights to the domain, even when an agency registered it for you. Other registries have their own rules, but the check is the same and takes five minutes: if someone else is listed, your address on the web belongs to them.

What comes out of the export?

Not whether there is an export, but what is in it: which format, what structure, and whether someone else could work with it. Run a test export before you put a year of work into the tool, not after.

Where does it say why?

Every setting that is not obvious was once a decision. One sentence per decision, with the reason, is enough. Without it the next person inherits only the result and has to guess the reason.

Who besides one person understands it?

If the answer is nobody, you do not have a system. You have a person your business depends on. That can work out. You cannot plan on it.

Custom software even more so

Software built for you faces the same questions, harder, because there is no second vendor selling the same product. A system only its author understands is not a tool. It is a dependency with a monthly invoice.

A client who can leave at any time stays for better reasons.

Take the tool you use most and export everything today. Open the file. If you understand what is in it, you are fine. If not, you now know what leaving would look like, and you still have time to plan it.