Almost every platform will say you own your customer list, and it settles nothing. What matters is whether you can see it, take it, lawfully use it, and whether they are using it too.
General e-commerce is built to put a package in the mail. Cottage food is built around a person collecting something on a specific day, under state rules that often prohibit shipping entirely.
This is not hypothetical. The failure mode is rarely an orderly wind-down with an export window; it is a domain that stops working, often with no announcement at all.
The clauses that cost vendors money are dull: renewal terms, unused annual terms, price-change notice, and content licences. None appear on a pricing page.
Ask questions with numeric answers. 'Do you handle sales tax?' gets a yes. 'Do you calculate, file, and remit, and in which states?' gets something you can act on.
Nothing is ambiguous to its author, which is why a platform that passed every test you ran alone can still produce a bad first weekend.
Most vendors waste whichever trial length they get by starting the clock before they are ready. A seven-day trial spent hunting through a camera roll tells you nothing about the platform.
You are locked in to the extent that something you depend on exists only inside one company's system. Ask of each asset: if this platform vanished on Friday, would I still have it?
A free tier is a customer acquisition channel, which means it is designed to be sufficient but not quite comfortable. Knowing where the platform's money comes from tells you where the edge is before y
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