I've been reading a lot of Alistair Croll (author of Just Evil Enough) lately. He wrote a piece recently called "The Skeleton Key" that I keep coming back to. The core idea is that AI is becoming a lockpick for the deliberate friction platforms build to keep you stuck. He frames it as a happy vs. hostage distinction—happy customers stay because the product is good, hostage customers stay because leaving hurts too much.
It's a great piece. And it got me thinking about something I see constantly in my own work, at a much smaller scale than the platform wars he's describing. I'm talking about your website.
Founders think about lock-in all the time. Which CRM traps your customer data or which SaaS tool becomes impossible to rip out once your team builds around it. These conversations come up constantly in early-stage companies, and they should. But there's one that almost never gets asked until it's too late.
Nobody thinks about the website.
Not until they're already stuck and trying to figure out how they got there. And by then, it's usually an ugly mess to untangle. So let's talk about it.
The lock that only shows up when you try to leave
Here's a pattern I see often.
An early-stage team needs something live. Someone on the team—maybe the founder but oftentimes an engineer—puts together a Wix or Squarespace site. It looks fine. It does the job. The company raises a round, the team grows, and suddenly the placeholder site doesn't cut it anymore. So they come to us.
Oftentimes, there's nothing to migrate. They weren't locked out of their content exactly—they just never had anything worth taking with them. A few pages, some copy, maybe a logo. The site gets rebuilt from scratch and nobody really thinks twice about it.
But here's what's actually happening. They were locked in the whole time. They just never tried to leave, so the lock never revealed itself.
Wix is worth naming directly here because Alistair actually calls them out too. There is no real export on Wix. You can't download your site files and move them somewhere else. If you decide to move on, you don't migrate, you rebuild. Every page, every image, every line of copy. That's a deliberate business decision. The harder leaving is, the fewer people try. Squarespace is a bit more generous but follows similar logic. You get some content out, but the structure and design don't travel with you.
What portability actually means (and what it doesn't)
Webflow and WordPress are genuinely different here, and I want to be honest about what that means because I think "portability" gets used loosely in ways that set the wrong expectations.
With Webflow, you can export your code anytime. What comes out is clean, standard HTML and CSS—not some proprietary format only Webflow understands. Any developer can read it and work with it. Your CMS content exports as CSV. Your images export as URLs. On the WordPress side, your content exports into XML or really whatever format you need. Posts, pages, metadata, all of it comes with you.
So yes, both platforms have real portability. But here's the part I want founders to understand. Content portability and architecture portability are two different things, and conflating them leads to some unpleasant surprises.
Your words are yours. Your images are yours. That content is accessible and exportable on both platforms and that genuinely matters. But the infrastructure—the CMS logic, the forms, the dynamic pieces that make everything work together—that doesn't just pack up and move. You'd have clean code and exportable content, but you'd still need to rebuild the machinery around it somewhere else.
So when I talk about Webflow or WordPress being portable, what I really mean is: you're never cut off from what you created. That's fundamentally different from Wix. But I'm not going to pretend it's a one-click handoff either, because that wouldn't be true.
The lock-in nobody thinks to blame the agency for
The platform is often not your biggest lock-in risk. The agency is.
I've seen it more times than I'd like. A company comes to us having worked with another firm, and what they got back is a tangled mess. Design decisions nobody documented and custom code only one developer understands. A site so wired to a specific way of working that changing anything causes a chain reaction of issues. The platform was fine. The build was the problem.
That's artificial lock-in and it's a choice every agency makes, whether they are intentional about it or not. When we build in Webflow we use the Finsweet Client-First framework—it's a publicly documented, industry-standard approach that any decent Webflow developer can pick up without a briefing from us. The handoff includes training, not just a login. The goal is a site that belongs to the client, not to us.
Honestly, that's just how it should work.
One question worth asking before you build anything
Alistair ends his piece with an investment heuristic: short the companies whose business model depends on customers not being able to leave. I'd offer a simpler version for founders picking an agency or a platform for the first time.
Ask one question: if we parted ways tomorrow, what would we walk away with?
If the answer is clean content, standard code, and a platform that competes on the quality of the product rather than the pain of leaving—you're in a good spot. If the answer involves proprietary systems, undocumented builds, or a platform with no real exit—you're not buying a website. You're signing a lease you might not be able to get out of.
The best thing we can build for someone is something they never feel stuck inside. If the work is good, people stay. That's the only kind of retention worth building a business on.
This is part of the Founders Series, a collection of pieces we write specifically for early-stage teams working through the decisions that don't have obvious answers yet. If this resonated, the rest of the series is worth your time. Explore the Founders Series
