You are probably here because the last people who ran your database walked away from it. Microsoft stopped Visual FoxPro. Access is a component of an office suite. Notes has changed owners twice. So being asked to trust a one-person company that has not launched is a lot, and “we would never do that” is worth nothing. What follows is a mechanism instead.
Export gives you a JSON file holding the design and every record. Plain text. You can open it in Notepad. Nothing of ours is required to read it, now or in ten years.
Export .zip gives you that same JSON plus the actual bytes of every attachment. That is the one that is genuinely all of it.
The plain JSON carries an attachment manifest whether or not it carries the files, so the smaller export tells you what it is not giving you. That was not always true: the JSON export once omitted attachments entirely while the button called it a complete copy, and somebody with a contracts register would have found out only when they needed a file. It is in the code comment as a fixed defect, which is a better guarantee than a sentence on a marketing page.
The desktop app keeps your data as an encrypted SQLite database in your own profile directory, with the key held in your operating system’s secure store rather than in the file. SQLite is the most widely deployed database format there is and its file format is committed to being readable for decades.
If this company stopped existing tonight, that file would still be on your disk in the morning. No server of ours is involved in it being there.
An export hands you your data and a description of your design. It does not hand you a running application. Without software that reads the format, you have your records, your relationships and your field definitions in a shape any developer can work with. That is a great deal more than a dead .accdb or an .fmp12 nobody can open. It is still not the same thing as your app continuing to run, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
Two smaller limits, for completeness. The hosted copy of your data lives on our server, so the desktop app is the part that survives us, not the browser. And there is no iPhone or Android app yet, so “on your own machine” means a computer.
A product that is hard to leave has to be. If the only thing keeping you is that your data is trapped, the product was not good enough to keep you on its own. We would rather compete on whether the thing is worth using.
If you would rather not rebuild it yourself: tell us what the old system does and we will build a working version and show you. No fee and no card — what we build fits the free plan, and we ask you to pay only once it is genuinely running your business.