Data Portability

Data portability is the ability to extract your data from a service in a structured, machine-readable form that another system can ingest. It is both a legal concept — under GDPR, individuals have a right to receive their personal data in a portable format — and, more usefully for a buyer, an operational property of a product that determines how expensive it will be to leave. Nearly every SaaS product can export something. That is not the question. The question is whether the export preserves what makes the data valuable. A CSV of records without their relationships, attachments, version history, comment threads, permissions, custom field definitions or workflow state is a file, not a migration. The gap between "we support export" and "we support leaving" is where lock-in actually lives, and it is almost never visible from the pricing page. Test portability before you commit, not at the end. Run an export during the trial and look at what came back: does it include every object type or only the primary table, are attachments included or only linked by a URL that will stop resolving when the account closes, is there a documented API you could use to pull the rest, and is bulk export rate-limited in a way that makes a large account impractical to move? Check the contract too, since technical capability and contractual right are different things: confirm you may export at any time and not only at termination, that the vendor will provide the data in a usable format on request, and how long data remains retrievable after the subscription ends before deletion. A thirty-day window is common and short.