Your data was never ours to keep

There is a business model as old as software, and it works like this. Make the tool useful. Make it the place your work lives. Then make leaving expensive, not impossible, just painful enough that you never quite get around to it. Your data goes in easily and comes out mangled, or in a format only the vendor can read, or not at all. The lock was never on the front door. It was always on the way out.

It is effective, and we think it is a quiet kind of theft. Slow, legal, entirely normal, and theft all the same, because the thing being held to ransom is yours.

Rented

Your work lives behind someone else's login. Stop paying and it is gone.

Yours

Export anytime, open formats, no exit fee. The door stays unlocked.

We will charge. That is not the same thing.

Let's be clear, because the two get confused on purpose. Kind Machines is a business. Some of our tools cost money, and some run as a service you pay for. That is how a studio keeps the lights on and keeps building. Charging for good software is honest work. Trapping your data so you cannot leave is not. Those two things get bundled together so often that people assume they arrive as a pair. They do not.

You should pay us because the tool is worth it this month. Not because leaving would cost you last year's work.

What "yours" actually means

Ownership is not a checkbox marked "export" buried three menus deep. It is a short list of promises we intend to keep:

• Everything you make leaves in an open format, one you can actually open somewhere else.
• Your work is never held hostage by a lapsed subscription. Stop paying and you can still take all of it with you.
• We do not mangle it on the way out. An ID stays an ID, a leading zero stays a leading zero, a date is the date you typed.
• No exit fee. No "contact sales to export." No format that only we can read.

Designing for people to leave is exactly what makes them stay.

The door stays unlocked

Here is the strange part. When the exit is genuinely easy, staying stops being a trap you are caught in and becomes a choice you keep making. It forces us to earn the next month on the merits, every single month. That is the only relationship worth having, and it is the one we want.

Your data was never ours to keep. We are just looking after it while you are here. The door is always unlocked, and we hope you never need it.