Leverage — Where Your Effort Pays
What You Bought: Where It Runs, and What Happens If You Stop Paying
There are two ways to have this system, they end differently, and almost nobody tells you which one you have until it matters. Here is how to tell, in one question.
One question tells you which one you have
Whose accounts is it running in?
If the answer is *mine — my hosting, my database, my domain registrar, my accounts* — you bought an install.
If the answer is *theirs, I sign in and it is just there* — you have a tenancy.
That is the whole test. Everything below follows from it, and the two answers are genuinely different arrangements rather than two prices for the same thing.
The install
You paid once. The system was built into your own accounts and it is yours to run for as long as you want to run it.
- It keeps working if you never pay another invoice. There is no licence key, no activation check, no switch anyone can flip. That is deliberate and it is built that way on purpose — not a policy that could be revised later.
- What you stop getting is improvement. Engine updates flow to whoever is subscribed. Without that, your copy keeps doing exactly what it does today, and slowly drifts away from the current version.
- Support follows the same line. If you change the engine yourself, you keep the system and lose support on what you changed.
You can add updates and operations later without rebuying anything. They are a separate line, and so are marketing services if you want them.
The tenancy
You subscribe monthly. The system runs on our managed instance and your subscription is a licence for as long as it runs.
- Your content, your configuration, your data and your customer list are yours, in your name, and you can export them at any time — not just on the way out.
- When the subscription ends, the managed instance ends with it. We export your data, content and configuration in your name and hand them over. You do not keep a running copy, because the thing that was running was ours.
That is the honest version and it is worth saying plainly, because the opposite is easy to assume and expensive to assume wrongly.
What neither of them means
Neither arrangement means you own the software.
You own your content, your configuration, anything you or someone you hire builds on top, and your data, domain and hosting accounts. The engine underneath — the part that is shared, maintained and updated across everyone running it — is licensed to you, not sold.
If a vendor ever tells you that you own their platform outright, ask them what happens to your copy when they stop shipping updates. The answer is usually the same as ours; the difference is whether they said so before you asked.
Why this is lesson thirteen and not lesson one
Because for the first twelve lessons it does not change anything you do. The ops panel is the ops panel, the change loop is the change loop, and the work is identical either way.
It changes exactly two things, and both of them are things you plan around rather than operate around:
| Install | Tenancy | |
|---|---|---|
| If you stop paying | keeps running, stops improving | instance ends, data exported to you |
| Where your data physically sits | your accounts | our managed instance |
Know which one you have before you need to know.
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*Not sure which you have? Look at who the hosting invoice comes from. If it comes to you, it is an install.*