Exactly, after 15 years of web development, I never lock any customers into any proprietary anything. The cost, time, suffering, that come with the failure of a company we rely on is no longer worth it.
We have dealt with this a couple times with shopping cart providers, mls idx search systems, do-it-yourself website systems, captcha systems, cms systems (paid-for, now with no upgrade path for things like PHP5 to 7), payment processing systems, and more I probably can't think of at the moment.
If it's not open source, and self-hosted, then we walk away.
The only things we kind-of lock into now are hosting providers, email providers, and domain registrars. But we use pretty big and established operations for these just so we hopefully don't have to move things.
Not just the failure of a vendor, but the "success" too. They build the product out with a low-cost self-serve model and an army of loyal and enthusiastic customers, but then they get greedy / raise money / realize that they could be going after much bigger fish and they jack prices to the moon to shed all their current customers who are "holding them back". See Segment, Drip, and an endless list of others.
Would you mind mentioning who you use for hosting/email/domain registration? I'm doing research for a large migration and I love hearing what works for others in similar situations.
Not OP, but someone who is very familiar with this space:
Hosting... Don't do some crazy VPS thing, you don't want to worry about being a sysadmin. Dreamhost has a good WP setup with most things you'd need ready to go. There are lots of other "managed WordPress" companies too.
Email, just FastMail or G-Suite (Google Apps). Probably just the latter because it's familiar to most.
Registration is pretty negligible these days. I like Namecheap and their corporate values and support.
We have dealt with this a couple times with shopping cart providers, mls idx search systems, do-it-yourself website systems, captcha systems, cms systems (paid-for, now with no upgrade path for things like PHP5 to 7), payment processing systems, and more I probably can't think of at the moment.
If it's not open source, and self-hosted, then we walk away.
The only things we kind-of lock into now are hosting providers, email providers, and domain registrars. But we use pretty big and established operations for these just so we hopefully don't have to move things.