The announcement came by email, at the bottom
One line about end of support, a date nine months out, and a link to a migration offer onto their new product — more expensive, and not doing the same thing.
By situation
Your vendor is closing, getting acquired, or tripling its price. The countdown started without you.
The first thing to do isn't choosing the replacement: it's obtaining a full export of your data while the account is still active. Both negotiating power and technical access shrink as the date approaches, and an export requested in the final week often arrives incomplete.
What brought you here
The acquisition changed everything but the name
Support replies in three days, the features you used are "under review", and the next renewal comes with a price that bears no relation to the last one.
You don't know what you'll be able to take with you
The contacts, probably. Service history, attachments, signed documents, custom fields: nobody can confirm, and that's exactly where the value is.
What we actually do
Export first, decide second
We retrieve everything retrievable while the account still works, including what has no official export button. With your data in hand, you choose without a deadline at your back.
We verify the export is complete, not that it exists
A downloaded file is no guarantee. We count records, open attachments, compare against the totals shown in the old tool. Gaps surface now, not after shutdown.
Staying is an option we cost too
Sometimes paying the increase for one more year costs less than a rushed migration in peak season. That calculation gets done, and sometimes it concludes against us.
When this isn't for you
This isn't for you if the replacement is already chosen and you just need someone to import a file: your new vendor will do it, and probably better, since they know their own format. Our work starts where what needs to come out has no button to make it happen.
No sales page writes this section. That's precisely why it's here: it saves you a thirty-minute call, and saves us an engagement we'd decline anyway.
Questions we get on this
Can the vendor refuse to hand over my data?
Contracts vary and we don't give legal advice. In practice the difficulty is rarely a formal refusal: it's an official export covering only part of what the tool displays. That gap is what we go after.
How far ahead of the deadline should we start?
As early as possible, for a specific reason: while the subscription is active, technical access is complete and you still have someone to talk to. Both advantages vanish on shutdown day, not gradually.
Neighbouring situations
Fifteen minutes to find out whether we can be useful.
You leave with what we saw, in writing, even if we never work together.