Small businesses now run on rented software. Customer lists live in a CRM, the books in an accounting package, sales history in a point-of-sale system, and the website on someone else's server. Each of those subscriptions is easy to start. Far fewer are easy to leave with everything you put in.
Our position is simple: a complete, usable export of your own data, available at any time on every paid plan without an exit fee, should be treated as a basic part of the product, not a premium feature or an afterthought. Buyers should weigh it as heavily as price, and vendors that make leaving hard should expect to lose business for it.
Why this matters more than it used to
A decade of software as a service has moved the most valuable records a small business owns, who its customers are and what they bought, into systems the business does not control. When a vendor raises prices, gates a feature behind a higher tier, or bundles a new AI add-on into the bill, the customer's main bargaining power is the ability to walk away. That power is only real if the data can walk away too.
Regulators have noticed the same dynamic. When the European Commission explained its Data Act, it said cloud customers "currently face a number of barriers" to switching, "including high charges associated with, for example, data egress, lengthy procedures and a lack of interoperability between providers that can result in a loss of data and applications." In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority's cloud services market investigation, which concluded in July 2025, found that data egress fees and barriers to interoperability restrict switching, and said those fees weigh most heavily on smaller customers relative to their total cloud spending.
Those findings are about cloud infrastructure, the layer below the apps most small firms buy. But the mechanism is the same one a small business meets with its CRM or bookkeeping software: if getting your data out is slow, partial or expensive, the price you pay at renewal is set by the cost of leaving, not by the value you are getting.
What regulation now says
The EU has gone furthest. The Data Act has applied since 12 September 2025. According to the Commission, it requires providers of platform and software as a service to "make open interfaces available and, at a minimum, export data in a commonly used and machine-readable format," and it will "entirely remove switching charges, including charges for data egress" from 12 January 2027. Until then, the Commission says, providers may still charge fees tied to the costs of switching and data egress.
The UK has taken a different route. In March 2026 the CMA's board said Amazon and Microsoft were taking "material steps to lower egress fees and improve interoperability," that it would review progress, and that it would open a separate investigation into Microsoft's business software. That is pressure on the largest providers, not a general rule for every app a small firm uses.
Outside the EU, then, what a small business can take with it when it leaves usually comes down to the vendor's own terms and tools. That is exactly why the buyer has to ask.
(This is a description of what regulators have published, not legal advice. If a contract dispute or a switching right matters to your business, speak to a qualified adviser.)