Three of the four engagements that have walked into our audits this year had the same story: someone built them an AI thing, it kind of works, and they have no idea what's inside it or how to move it to a new vendor.
The product was great. The relationship was not.
So we made a rule: you own what we build. That means:
- The code, the prompts, the integration logic, the data flows — yours. In your accounts, on your repos (if you use them), connected to your tools using your own API keys.
- The documentation. We write down what each component does, in plain English, in a folder you control.
- The handoff path. If you decide to move to a different vendor — or pull it in-house, or pause for six months — you can. We don't make that harder than it needs to be.
Why this matters more for small businesses
A 50-person enterprise can absorb vendor lock-in. They have a procurement team, a legal team, an IT team. If a vendor goes sideways, they have leverage and patience.
A 9-truck plumbing company has none of that. If we built a system that only ran inside our infrastructure, on our keys, and we got hit by a bus tomorrow — that's a small business with a critical workflow stuck behind a dead vendor. That's a real risk, not a hypothetical one.
So we treat the build the same way we'd want our own family's contractor to treat a home renovation: when the project's done, the house is yours, the keys are yours, and the next contractor can pick up the work without starting from scratch.
What this doesn't mean
It doesn't mean we walk away the day the build goes live. Most of our customers stay on a Maintain & Grow plan for ongoing optimization — because the systems get better as your business evolves, and you want someone watching them. But the staying is by choice, not by lock-in.
A practical example
When we build a ServiceTitan-connected voice agent, that integration runs through your ServiceTitan API key, not ours. The Twilio number is in your Twilio account, not ours. The voice prompts and call flows live in a Notion (or Drive, or repo — your call) folder you can read, edit, and export.
If you fired us tomorrow, you'd still own a working system. If you wanted to take it to another consultancy, they could pick up where we left off without three months of reverse engineering.
That's the bar. It's a small thing on paper, but it changes the shape of the relationship — from "vendor with leverage" to "team you actually trust."