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.)
What a fair export looks like
A vendor that respects its customers should offer, on every paid plan:
- Everything, not a summary. Contacts, companies, transactions, notes, activity history, attachments and custom fields, not just a contact list.
- Common formats. CSV or another documented, machine-readable format that another system can import.
- Self-service. An export the customer can run without opening a support ticket or speaking to a retention team.
- No exit fee and no requirement to upgrade to a higher plan to get your own records.
- A grace period. Clear terms on how long data stays retrievable after a subscription ends.
None of this is exotic. The Data Act's minimum for SaaS providers in the EU covers much of the second point already. Vendors that meet it for European customers can usually offer the same to everyone.
The strongest argument against
The fairest objection is that exports are not free to build or run. Moving large volumes of data costs money, especially in infrastructure services, and engineering time spent on export tools is time not spent on features customers asked for. If vendors must give away exit, some will recover the cost through higher prices for everyone, including customers who never leave.
There is also a technical truth: not everything is portable. A CSV can carry contacts and invoices, but automations, reports, integrations and the way a team configured its workflows rarely translate cleanly into a rival's product. Some lock-in is simply the cost of having set up a system well, and no rule can remove it.
Both points are real. Neither changes our view. The cost of exporting a small business's records is modest compared with what it pays over a typical subscription, and the CMA's finding that egress fees fall hardest on smaller customers is the opposite of an argument for keeping them. As for workflows, nobody expects a vendor to rebuild its competitor's automations. What customers are owed is their own records, in a form they can use. The configuration can be rebuilt; a lost customer history cannot.
What buyers can do now
Until every vendor meets this standard, the protection is in the buying process:
- Test the export during the trial. Export a sample of real records and import them into a spreadsheet. If you cannot, ask why before you sign.
- Check which plan the export is on. If full export is reserved for an upper tier, count that tier's price as the real cost.
- Read the termination terms for how long your data is kept after cancellation, and whether any fee applies to retrieve it.
- Export on a schedule, not just when you leave. A regular copy you hold yourself is a backup as well as an exit plan.
- Ask the question out loud. "How do I get all my data out, and what does it cost?" A vendor's answer to that question says a lot about how it expects to keep you.
Software vendors compete hard to win small business customers. They should compete just as hard to keep them, on product and price. Making it easy to leave is how a vendor shows it is confident enough to do that.