The board doesn't forget.

Why it matters. Export is the only thing standing between you and a vendor who changes their price, their terms, or their mind. If it takes a support ticket, it isn't export, it's a favour.

Ours. Yes. Full export from inside the product, whenever you want, in open formats, including after you cancel. No fee, no ticket, no waiting period.

Why it matters. Small software companies fail, get acquired, or lose the one person who understood the code. The question isn't whether that risk exists. It's what the vendor has done about it.

Ours. We're a studio with fifteen shipped builds, not a weekend project, and we're still smaller than the alternatives, so price that in. What we've done about it is make your exit unconditional: documented export formats, no proprietary lock, and your data readable without our software. Your shop's twenty years of history should never depend on our survival.

Why it matters. Bundled card processing looks convenient until you compare the rate to what you had. On a shop doing real volume, a fraction of a point is worth more than the subscription.

Ours. No. Keep your own terminal and your own processor. We record the sale, the tax, and the total. We take nothing off your card volume, and we don't have a referral deal with a processor.

Why it matters. Plenty of shop software hides sensitive screens in the interface while the underlying data stays reachable. Hidden is not the same as restricted.

Ours. No. Roles are enforced on the server for every request, not hidden in the interface. A floor role that asks for a margin gets refused by the system, not by a missing button.

Why it matters. Most small-business software is multi-tenant. That's fine, it's how it stays affordable. What matters is whether isolation is enforced by the platform or by remembering to write the right query.

Ours. Tenant scoping is enforced at the platform layer, below the application, so a query that forgets its tenant doesn't return somebody else's rows. It returns nothing.

Why it matters. An annual contract with auto-renewal is a bet the vendor makes on your inertia. Read what happens at renewal, and what happens to your data if you stop paying.

Ours. Month to month. Cancel from inside the product. No annual term, no auto-renewing year, no early-termination fee, and no clawback on a founding rate you already used.

Why it matters. Ask for the actual path, not the promise. A support address that answers on Tuesday is fine for a report that looks wrong and useless when you can't take money.

Ours. A phone number that reaches the person who wrote the code, for a shop that can't take money. Email for everything else. We'll give you a real response time in writing before you sign, rather than publish one here we can't hold on a bad week.