What happens to your data if the software company folds?

Short answer: assume every tool you use will eventually stop existing, and judge it on how cleanly you could leave. A product you can walk away from in an afternoon is a small risk no matter how young it is. One that holds your records hostage is a large risk no matter how big it is.

It is not only small companies

People worry about this with startups and not with large vendors, which is backwards. Big companies discontinue products constantly — acquisitions, strategy changes, a line that stopped being profitable. The small outfit might go quiet; the large one will send you a cheerful email about an exciting transition with ninety days’ notice. Either way you are moving.

So this is not a reason to avoid early-stage software. It is a reason to check the exit on everything, which most people never do at any size.

What you actually need to get out

Think about what you would need if the tool vanished tonight and HMRC asked you a question in eighteen months. Roughly: your customers and their contact details; every quote and invoice with its number, date, amounts and tax treatment; what was paid and when; your mileage log with dates and distances; your receipts, as images, not just as totals; and your job records.

Note the difference between a list of figures and the underlying documents. An export that gives you a spreadsheet of invoice totals but not the invoice PDFs has given you a summary, not your records.

What a usable export looks like

Self-service. You can trigger it yourself, today, without asking. An export that requires emailing support is an export that does not exist on the day support stops answering.

Open formats. CSV, PDF, standard image files. Something a spreadsheet and your accountant can open without the original software.

Complete. Includes attachments and generated documents, not just database rows.

Unconditional. Available whether or not your subscription is current. A tool that locks your export behind a live payment has turned your own records into leverage.

Test it on day one, not day 400

Run the export in your first week, while you have almost nothing in there. Open the files. See what is in them. It takes ten minutes and it tells you more about the vendor’s attitude to your data than any policy page will. If it is awkward with twenty records it will be unusable with two thousand.

Build the habit, not just the plan

Export quarterly and keep it somewhere that is not the software — a folder on your own machine, backed up. Four exports a year, ten minutes each. If a tool disappears, you are missing at most a quarter and you rebuild that from your bank statements and your phone.

This is cheap insurance and it also quietly solves a separate problem: it gives your accountant something to work from without depending on your login. The wider version of this thinking — keeping a system you could reconstruct — is the same instinct behind knowing when you have outgrown the spreadsheet, and the same one that stops subscription creep turning into dependency.

The questions, in order

Can I export everything myself, right now? What formats? Does it include documents and images? Does it still work if I cancel? What happens to my data if you stop trading, and is that written down anywhere? Who holds the data and where?

A vendor who answers these quickly and without defensiveness is telling you something useful. So is one who does not.

How we answer them

GraftG is early-stage software from Green & Home Ltd, a real UK trading business, and we would rather you asked these questions than assumed. Your quotes and invoices exist as PDFs you already hold in your own WhatsApp thread, which is an unusual and genuinely useful property of a chat-based tool: a copy of every document you have sent sits on your phone, outside our systems, by default. Everything else is exportable.

If you want to see the whole thing before committing anything, there are 21 Founding Tradies places — twelve months free on the Pro plan, no card taken, then half price for life. Test the export in week one. That is exactly what we would do.

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.