Your Church Should Be Able to Leave Us

Every church that uses our software should be able to leave it. Completely, on an ordinary afternoon, with everything they brought and everything they built while they were with us. I want to explain why I think that is one of the most important product decisions we make, and why it runs against everything I was taught about building a software company.

The playbook I was taught

The standard advice in software is that retention is the business. You win a customer once and then you make leaving expensive. Not by locking the door, since that is crude and people notice, but by weaving yourself so deeply into their operations that walking out means rebuilding their life. The data is in a format only you can read. The integrations only work with you. The export exists, technically, in a settings page nobody has found, and it produces a file nobody can open.

I have seen this playbook work, and I have been inside companies that ran it well. It is a good business. And when the customer is a church, I think it is wrong, for reasons that have nothing to do with software.

What a church's records actually are

Think about what is in a church's database. Who was baptized, and when. Who was married. Who was buried, and who was there. The names of the people who gave when the roof needed fixing. The prayer requests of a congregation across a decade. The addresses of the shut-ins. The children who grew up in the youth group and came back with children of their own.

That is not customer data. That is the memory of a community, and in many congregations it is the only copy. Churches outlive companies by a very wide margin. The congregation using our software today has, in many cases, existed for a century and expects to exist for another one. We will not. No software vendor will. Every one of us is a temporary custodian of something that was here before us and will be here after we are gone.

Seen that way, lock-in is not a retention strategy. It is a stewardship failure. It means that a community's memory has been made hostage to the survival of a company, and companies do not survive. When ours ends, or pivots, or is bought by someone with different priorities, the church should lose nothing. Their history should walk out the door with them, intact, readable by whoever comes next.

Building the exit on purpose

So we build it on purpose, and I want to be concrete about what that means, because "you can export your data" is a phrase every vendor uses and almost none mean.

It means the export is complete. Not the member list without the giving history, not the giving history without the notes, not the notes in a format that turns to gibberish outside our system. Everything the church put in, and everything the church made while it was with us, in formats a volunteer with a laptop can open.

It means the export is not buried. It is a thing you can find, not a thing you have to ask for, and asking is not met with a retention call. It means the export works today, not after a ticket and a week.

It means we do not hold anything a church cannot take. This is the same reason we do not hold the offering. The moment a vendor holds something that cannot be retrieved, whether money or memory, the relationship has changed from service into custody, and custody of a church's life is not a role I want a company to have, including mine.

What it costs

I will not pretend this is free. A church that can leave easily sometimes will. Some of them will leave for a competitor that has read the standard playbook and will not let them leave again. Investors, when I have explained this, have had the polite expression of people watching a founder decline a lever that every other company in the category pulls.

There is also a quieter cost, which is discipline. When customers can leave, every release has to earn its place. There is no captive audience to absorb a bad quarter. I have come to see that as a feature. It keeps the company honest in exactly the place where software companies most often stop being honest, which is the year after the customer signed.

But the churches that stay, stay because the software is worth staying for, which is the only reason I want anyone to stay. And the trust it builds is not small. A pastor who knows the exit is real will put more into the system, not less, because the risk of putting it there has been removed. Lock-in produces customers who are staying because leaving hurts. An open door produces customers who are staying because they want to. I would rather build for the second kind, even if there are fewer of them.

The counterweight

There is a lazy version of this argument that I do not hold. It says that a company that makes leaving easy is more virtuous and therefore deserves to win. That is not how markets work, and I have watched better products lose to stickier ones too many times to believe it. Making the exit real is a cost, not a strategy, and it has to be paid for by being good at everything else.

But some costs are the price of being the right kind of company for the customer you chose. We chose churches. A church is a community that has entrusted its memory to us for a while. The least we can do is make sure that, when the while is over, they get all of it back.