"Audit Your SaaS Stack for Rug-Pull Risk in Twenty Minutes"

Take out a piece of paper, or open a note. Write down the tools you depend on for work. Not the tools you like. The tools you would have to stop working if they disappeared tomorrow. Time tracker. Invoicing. Project management. The ones that hold your history, your client data, your billing records.

For each one, answer five questions. You do not need to research the answers. Your gut is fine. The point is not precision. The point is to see how many no's you are sitting on.

#The five questions

1. Where does the data live? Is it on your machine, in a file or folder you can point to? Or is it on the vendor's servers, viewable only through their app? If you cannot answer the question with a file path, the data is not yours in any meaningful sense. You have access to it. That is different from owning it.

2. Can you export everything today, right now, without asking permission? Try it. Open the tool, find the export function, and export your full history. If the export is easy, complete, and does not require emailing support, you have a way out. If the export is buried, partial, or capped at a date range, leaving is harder than staying, and that friction is the vendor's retention strategy.

3. What would it actually cost you to leave? Not the money. The time. Count the hours it would take to export, clean, import, and reconcile. Count the history you would lose in the translation. Count the workflows you would have to rebuild. If the answer is more than a few days, you are not a customer. You are a hostage with a monthly invoice.

4. Who owns the company, and what happens if they sell? This is the question nobody asks until it is too late. A bootstrapped company with a founder who answers support emails is a different risk profile than a venture-backed company that needs to show growth to its next round. Neither is safe forever. But the second one is the one that reprices you, because the first one is still run by the person who promised they would not.

5. Does the tool work if the company disappears tomorrow? This is the real one. If the company folded this weekend, would the software still open on Monday? If the answer is yes, the data is truly yours. If the answer is no, you are renting access to your own work, and the lease can be repriced whenever the landlord decides.

#Scoring

Five yes's: you own your stack. You can leave any tool, any time, on the merits.

Three or four: you are mostly fine, but there is at least one tool holding your data hostage. That is the one to watch, and the one to replace first.

Two or fewer: you are exposed. Not catastrophically, maybe, but exposed. If one of those tools gets acquired this year, you will get the email, and you will pay, because leaving is too expensive.

#What to do with a bad score

Do not try to fix everything at once. Pick the tool with the most history in it, the one that would cost you the most to leave, and run it through the five questions again, this time looking for an alternative that passes.

For most people, that tool is the time tracker. It has the most history. It is the hardest to migrate. And it is the one that most recently demonstrated the risk, when Harvest repriced and a lot of people discovered they could not afford to leave.

I am biased, obviously. I built the alternative for that specific case. But the checklist does not care about my bias. Run your actual tools through it. If owntime passes and the others do not, that is useful information. If something else passes better, that is useful information too.

The point is not to buy something. The point is to know, for every tool you depend on, whether you are choosing to stay or whether you are stuck. Those feel the same until the day they do not.

Try owntime free for 14 days · See where your data lives · Read the honest comparison with Harvest