What you keep when the retainer ends

The lock-in fear is legitimate and specific. Founders have been burned by consultants who built something the founder could not touch, could not port, and could not maintain without paying the consultant forever.

Here is exactly what I do to make that impossible, structural, on day one.

Where the automation lives

Every credential I use sits on your accounts.

• Google Sheets connections use your Google account
• Stripe integrations use your Stripe account with your API keys
• The workflow tool (n8n, Zapier, whichever fits) is billed to your card, not mine
• Any small server-side pieces run on your Vercel, your Hostinger, your cloud provider

If you fire me tomorrow, you revoke my access from your side. I do not have a copy of anything I could log back into.

What lives in your repository

The workflows themselves are exported and committed to a git repository you own, under your GitHub organisation. I have contributor access, not owner access. On day one of month seven, you remove me. Repo, history, exports — all yours.

The runbook I write for your team lives in the same repo. So does the credentials map (encrypted, using your keys). So does the escalation playbook.

No piece of your automation lives on my laptop, in my Notion, in my Google Drive, or in any account with my name on it. On purpose.

The three exit clauses

Every retainer I write includes three exit clauses. These are policy commitments; the specific contract language is in the retainer draft I share before you sign.

One: Notice period is 30 days, either direction. No exit fee. No penalty. No clawback of setup work already paid for.

Two: On termination, I hand over the current state of the automation, the credentials map, the runbook, and the last 90 days of change history. The handover is included, not billed extra.

Three: For 30 days after termination, you can email me questions about how the system works. I answer them at no charge, once. Not ongoing support. A promise that the last 30 days do not become ghosting.

These clauses exist to make the exit boring. A boring exit is the point.

What you should still be careful about

The clean exit does not mean any other consultant can immediately pick up where I left off. It means you own everything they need to. That is not the same as guaranteeing they will want to.

n8n is a specific tool. If you plan to move to another n8n consultant, you will find people. If you plan to move to a Zapier consultant and I built you an n8n workflow, that consultant will rebuild rather than take over.

Practical advice: know which tool your workflow runs in. Switching consultants inside the same tool is easy. Switching tools is a mini-project.

The trade in return

The clean exit works both ways. If I end the retainer — usually because scope crept beyond what I said yes to — you get the same 30-day handover.

The point is that neither of us is trapped. If either of us is trapped, both of us start making bad decisions.

What this article does not claim

It does not claim switching consultants is free. Any switch has a re-learning cost. The clean exit reduces that cost. It does not eliminate it.

It does not claim every consultant works this way. Plenty of founders have tried to leave a previous vendor and discovered the code was in the vendor's account, the customer database in the vendor's Notion, credentials never shared. That is not neglect. That is a business model.

I do not use that business model. That is the point of this article.

The keeper

If you have to keep me because you cannot leave me, both of us have already lost.

The retainer works because you renew it every month by choice. The clean exit is the reason that choice is real.

Talk to me

If you want the exact contract language, book 30 minutes. I will send you the retainer draft in advance so you can read the exit clauses before we talk.