Own everything: the vendor-replaceability test

There’s a question I encourage every non-technical founder to ask any agency, freelancer, or platform — including me: if we stopped working together tomorrow, what exactly would I lose?

The healthy answer is boring: “some momentum, and you’d need to find someone new.” The unhealthy answers hide in the plumbing: the domain is registered under the agency’s account, the code lives in their repository, the analytics are on their dashboard, the hosting bill runs through their card, and the export button — if it exists — produces a CSV nobody has ever tested. That’s not a service relationship. That’s a hostage situation with a monthly invoice.

Why it happens

Rarely out of malice. Vendor lock-in is mostly an accident of convenience: it’s genuinely faster to spin things up under accounts you already control. Every shortcut in week one becomes switching cost in year two. And because the cost only appears when the relationship sours, nobody prices it in at the start — the moment when you have all the leverage.

The rule I work by

When I build with someone, everything lives in their name from the first week: repository, hosting, domain, analytics, email, data. My access is granted by them and revocable by them. I insist on this even when clients don’t ask — especially when they don’t ask — because the ones who don’t ask are the ones who get burned.

This isn’t altruism; it’s incentive design. A partner who can be replaced without pain has to be worth keeping every single month. I want that pressure. It’s the same reason this site’s entire stack runs on my own accounts on portable, boring technology — I apply the test to my own vendors too.

How to run the test yourself

Ask your current provider — politely, hypothetically — these five:

1. Can I log into the domain registrar myself, today?
2. Is the code in a repository I own, with full history?
3. If I export my data right now, is the export complete and readable?
4. Whose name is on the hosting and analytics accounts?
5. If you disappeared, could a competent stranger pick this up from what exists — or does the knowledge live only in your head?

Anyone worth working with answers in five minutes without flinching. The flinch is the answer.

The AI-era version

This test is about to matter more, not less. As more businesses get built on AI-assisted delivery, the tempting shortcut is renting your whole operation from whoever runs the agents. Same trap, faster. The fix doesn’t change: own the accounts, own the data, own the deployment path — and let the builder be brilliant and replaceable.

Momentum should be the only thing anyone can take from you.