Most vendor evaluations focus on the day you sign up. The more honest test of whether a vendor trusts its own product is what happens the day you decide to leave — and whether that process is designed to be easy or designed to be a reason to stay.
Access revokes immediately, not on a support ticket
As covered in how STIV connects without a migration, revoking a division's access to your inbox, CRM, accounting, or docs is immediate and doesn't require a support ticket or a contract amendment. The same is true at offboarding: disconnecting a division or ending a contract cuts off access to connected systems on the timeline you choose, not on a vendor's processing schedule.
What you take with you
- Every drafted output, reconciled record, and reviewed contract STIV touched stays exportable — nothing is locked into a proprietary format you can't read elsewhere.
- The full audit trail — every decision, approval, edit, and rejection, logged and timestamped as described in our security architecture piece — exports with it, not just the outputs themselves.
- Playbooks, approval rules, and thresholds your team defined are yours to keep and reuse, whether that's with a different vendor or a rebuilt internal process.
- Nothing about export requires renegotiating the contract you're ending — it's part of what you were licensing the whole time, not a paid add-on at the exit.
Why this is worth stating plainly
A vendor that makes leaving hard is quietly betting that switching costs, not ongoing value, are what keeps a customer renewing. STIV's approval-gated model already means your team, not the system, made every consequential decision along the way — the audit trail proves that on the way out as clearly as it does while you're a customer. If the product is worth keeping, that should be provable by what it's done, not by how expensive it is to check.
In practice, few customers who reach this stage are leaving because the mechanism failed — the approval gate and audit trail described throughout this site are the same on day 400 as they are on day one. But a company that's only willing to explain its exit process when asked directly isn't one worth trusting with the connect-and-learn stage in the first place.