Do you actually own it? The contract questions that decide.

The cheapest AI vendor is expensive if leaving them means starting over. Ownership and exit are decided in the contract you sign before the work starts — not in the conversation you have two years later when the renewal price arrives.

The five clauses worth insisting on

1. Work product ownership. All code, prompts, evaluation sets, and documentation are yours on creation — not on final payment, not on request. Written plainly, with no carve-out for "vendor background technology" broad enough to swallow the build.

2. Deployment location. The system runs in infrastructure you control, under your accounts. This single clause is what converts leaving from a rebuild into a decision.

3. Data rights. Your data is not used to train shared models. Your data is returned in a standard format on request and deleted on termination, within a stated number of days.

4. Exit assistance. A defined transition period at a defined rate, with documentation handed over. Vendors who intend to keep you honest will agree to this without discussion; the reaction to the ask is itself informative.

5. Change disclosure. If the underlying model or prompts change, it is tested against the evaluation set and you are told before it reaches production. Silent model swaps are how a working system quietly stops working.

The question behind all five

Ask it directly on the first call: if we part ways in eighteen months, what exactly do I still have?

A vendor building for your benefit answers instantly and specifically — the code, the evals, the data, running where it already runs. A vendor building for lock-in gives you a long answer about partnership. Listen for which one you get.

Why we hand it all over

Because a client who stays by choice is worth more than one who stays because leaving is expensive, and because the discipline of building something you could walk away with produces better software. It has to actually work, because nothing else is holding it in place.

Every build ships in your cloud, under your App Store account, with the repository in your name from the first commit. If you want to check whether any other vendor meets that bar, the AI Vendor Scorecard grades it in three minutes and gives you the exact clause language to demand.