We have a thing about this. It comes up on every call, it is in our contracts, and we will bring it up unprompted while you are trying to ask about something else.
It is because of a phone call we have had more than once.
A therapist decides to move off her subscription website platform. She has been paying for four years. She has a new designer lined up. She emails support to cancel, and asks them to send over her site files so the new person has something to work from.
And support tells her, politely, that there is nothing to send.
What you are actually paying for
Here is the arrangement, and it is not a scam. It is in the terms. It is just that nobody reads terms at 11pm while starting a practice.
With most subscription website platforms you are paying for access to a website, not for a website. Your monthly fee covers the design, the hosting, the support and the platform. Stop paying and the access ends, which is the entire point of a subscription.
What you keep when you leave is usually your domain name, if you registered it yourself, and whatever text you personally wrote and can copy and paste out of the browser before the account closes.
What you generally do not keep: the design, the layout, the code, the images they licensed, and often the content their team wrote for you.
You have been renting. Renting is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It just is not the same as owning, and the marketing rarely makes that distinction clearly.
Why this bothers us more than it probably should
Because of what it does to the decision.
When you own nothing, leaving is expensive. Not in cancellation fees, in starting over. So people stay on platforms that stopped working for them, sometimes for years, because the cost of leaving feels bigger than the cost of staying.
We have watched practices sit on a site they were embarrassed by, that was not bringing them a single inquiry, because moving meant losing everything and beginning again from a blank page.
That is not a business relationship. That is a hostage situation with a nice logo.
And it works, commercially. Churn goes down when leaving is painful. We are not accusing anyone of anything, we are pointing out that the incentives are not pointed at you. If you want the full breakdown including current pricing, we put it in our honest review of Brighter Vision and TherapySites.
What ownership actually means
It is more than one thing, and platforms will sometimes give you two of the five and call it ownership. Here is the whole list.
Your domain
Registered in your name, in an account you control, with your credit card on it. This is the one people most often do have and the one that matters most, because your domain is your address. If someone else registered it for you, that is worth fixing today regardless of anything else in this article.
Your files
The actual site. Whatever a new developer would need to pick it up and keep going. If nobody can hand you this, you do not own the website, you have a subscription to it.
Your hosting
An account in your name that you can log into, move, or hand to someone else. Hosting bundled invisibly into a monthly fee is not hosting you control.
Your content
The words and images. If a platform wrote your copy, check whether you have a license to it or whether it goes back in the box when you leave.
Your data
Your analytics, your Google Search Console, your Google Business Profile. These should be in accounts you own with someone else added as a user, never the reverse. Losing your search history when you switch providers means losing every bit of evidence about what was working.
Three questions, and get the answers in writing
If you are currently on a platform, or considering one, email support and ask these. Not a phone call. Email, so you have it.
- If I cancel, what exactly can I take with me? Please be specific about design files and content.
- Is my domain registered to me or to you?
- Can I export my site content, and in what format?
If the answers are clear and you are fine with them, great. Genuinely. Some practices should be on a subscription platform and we will tell you so on a call.
If the answers are vague, that is the answer.
How we do it, since you are going to ask
When we finish a build, it is yours. The site, the domain, the files, the hosting logins, the content, all of it, from day one.
If you decide next week that you hate us, you keep the website. You do not owe us a fee to get it. We do not hold anything back as leverage.
We also stay on monthly with a lot of clients, because search does not sit still and a site that is never touched quietly stops working. But that is a decision you get to make every month based on whether we are worth it, not a decision made for you by the fact that leaving would cost you your website.
We would rather earn it.
If you are stuck right now
You are not stuck as badly as you think.
Your domain is portable, and it is the thing that carries your search history. Your content can be copied out before you cancel, and honestly a lot of it should be rewritten anyway. Your Google Business Profile is yours and has nothing to do with your website platform. Your reviews stay put.
What you lose is a template you did not choose and a design that looked like four hundred other practices. Which, from where we sit, is not a loss.
Do not cancel before the new site is ready. Build first, launch, then cancel. Never leave a gap where your website does not exist.
And copy everything out first. Every page, every blog post, into a document, before you tell them you are leaving. We have seen accounts close faster than people expected.
The point
You are a professional running a business. The thing your business runs on should belong to you.
That is not a radical position. It is just less common than it should be in this particular corner of the internet.
If you want to know what shape your current site is in, the free scan on our homepage will tell you, without asking for your email or a call. If you want to talk about what moving looks like, here is how we work. And if you are weighing whether to handle it yourself, we wrote about DIY versus hiring someone with no particular agenda.