Who Actually Owns Your Website?

Here's a question worth asking before you sign up for anything, anywhere: if you stopped paying tomorrow, what would you actually be left with? For a lot of website platforms, the honest answer is "nothing" — and that's not a bug, it's the business model.

How lock-in actually happens

It's rarely a single dramatic clause. It's usually three smaller things stacked together:

• →Platform-hosted builders. A site built inside Wix, Squarespace, or a similar all-in-one platform doesn't export as a portable website — it only exists inside that platform. Stop paying, the site disappears. That's not a website you own; it's a rental with a nice interface.
• →Annual contracts with early-termination fees. Common with larger agencies — you're locked in for 12+ months regardless of whether the relationship is working.
• →"We hold your domain/code" arrangements. Some shops register your domain in their account, not yours, or never actually hand over the source files. Technically legal, practically hostage-taking.

What real ownership looks like

Three concrete things, all true the day your setup fee clears:

• →You get the code. Actual files — HTML, CSS, JS — not a black-box export from a proprietary builder. Portable to any host, any time.
• →Your domain is registered to you. Not us. If we ever stopped existing tomorrow, your domain wouldn't even notice.
• →No license fee, ever. The setup fee is a one-time payment for work completed. There's no recurring "site license" that keeps the site legally yours only as long as you keep paying it.

What actually happens if you cancel the Care Plan

Since this is the question people are really asking: nothing dramatic. Your site keeps running exactly as it was. You (or a new host of your choosing) take over responsibility for hosting, DNS, and updates going forward. There's no penalty, no site takedown, no "pay a reactivation fee" surprise. There's also no refund on the setup fee — fair, since that work is already done and delivered — but everything you paid for stays exactly where it is: live, and yours.

Cancellation terms: month-to-month, 30 days notice, no long-term contract on any tier. If you want the plain-numbers version of what the Care Plan includes at each tier, see the full Care Plan breakdown.

Why we run it this way

Structuring it any other way would mean the incentive to keep your site fast, secure, and well-supported disappears the moment you're locked in. No lock-in means the only way to keep a client is to keep doing good work — which is a much better incentive for you than for us to have, and we'd rather build the business on that than on cancellation fees.