What "you own it" actually means
Ownership isn't a line in a contract. It's whether you can walk away tomorrow and keep everything.
Ask a simple question before you hire anyone to build your software: if they vanished tomorrow, what would you still have?
The honest answer tells you everything.
Lock-in is rarely loud
Nobody sells you lock-in. It arrives quietly: a proprietary platform here, an account in their name there, a deploy only they know how to run. Each step is reasonable. The sum is a leash.
One day you want to change something small, and you realize you can't touch your own software without them.
Ownership is a checklist, not a feeling
You own it when:
- the code is in your repository, not theirs;
- the data is exportable, in a format you can read;
- the accounts (domain, hosting, email, analytics) are in your name;
- the infrastructure can be handed to another team without a rescue mission.
If all four are true, you're free. If any is false, you're renting your own business.
We build for the day you leave
It sounds strange for a studio to design for its own exit. We think it's the point.
When you can walk away and keep everything, staying is a choice, and a studio that has to earn that choice every month builds better software than one that has you locked in.
Own it. Then decide who you want to build with.