What happens to your data if we go out of business

Written by the person who would be going out of business · 29 August 2026, updated 22 September 2026

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.

Two buttons, in the product today

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.

One table into a spreadsheet: Download as CSV

Every list in the app has a Download as CSV button. It gives you the records you are looking at, with your filter and sort applied — every matching row, not just the ones on screen — as a file that opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. The columns are the ones the list shows, headed the way the list heads them. A link comes out as the linked record’s name, a person as their name, a date as a date and a number as a number you can add up.

It is a copy of one table, not a copy of your app. A CSV has no attached files and no history of who changed what. It also has no record identity: a link arrives as a name, so the file cannot rebuild the links between collections if you import it somewhere else. For all of that, the two buttons above remain the complete copy.

Until 22 September 2026 there was no CSV export at all, and this page said so in a heading, because we would rather you read a limit here than discover it on the day you are leaving. That limit is gone. The ones in the paragraph above are not, and they are the ones worth knowing before you rely on a spreadsheet as your only copy.

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.

On the desktop, the question barely arises

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.

The limit, which is where a vendor would stop talking

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.

And the smaller version of the same question: what if you stop paying?

People ask this more often than they ask about us going under, and it deserves the same kind of answer — a description of what the software does, not a promise.

Cancelling does not delete anything and does not lock anything. The account becomes a free-plan app account: as many apps as you like, 10 GiB of files, and 10,000 records in each app. Everything you built is still there, still yours, still exportable with the same one download described above. No grace period runs out, because nothing is counting.

The one edge worth stating plainly, since it is the only place this pinches: if an app already holds more than the free limit when you cancel, it keeps every record it already has and simply will not let you add a new one until you delete some or start paying again. Nothing is hidden, nothing is deleted, and the export still hands you all of it. We would rather say that here than have you find it on the day you tried to add a record.

Why we can afford to say this

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.