Who actually owns your software?
Building on a vibe-coding platform feels free and fast. Your app appears in minutes, hosted and running, no infrastructure to worry about. The catch shows up later, when you try to leave, scale, or simply answer a basic question: is this software actually yours?
Free and fast, until you try to leave
A Dutch studio that rebuilds these apps puts it plainly: your app, your data and your logins all run on the platform of your vibe-coding tool, and the bigger your app gets, the more expensive it becomes to move. As long as everything is going well, you do not feel it. The moment the platform raises its prices, changes direction, or has a breach, you are stuck, and migrating away is suddenly a project of its own.
Three kinds of lock-in hiding in AI-built apps
Platform lock-in
Your app runs on the vendor's servers with platform-specific pieces baked in. You can often export the code, but it will not simply run somewhere else.
Data and compliance lock-in
Your data, often on servers outside Europe, sits inside someone else's environment. Without the right safeguards in place (a valid transfer mechanism such as Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework), that is a real GDPR exposure for customer, health or financial data.
Knowledge lock-in
Nobody fully understands the generated code, so you depend on the tool that made it. The most quietly dangerous lock-in is not owning the understanding of your own software.
And legally, who even owns it?
There is a quieter question underneath. Code generated purely by AI, with little meaningful human input, sits in a grey zone for copyright protection. And some popular assistants send fragments of your code to their own servers to work, which is a real concern if your software contains trade secrets. Ownership is not just where the code runs, it is whether you can actually claim it as yours.
Software that is actually yours
We build, or rebuild, on a foundation you fully control, so nothing important depends on a platform you do not own.
Your code, your keys
Readable, documented code that you own outright, with no platform-specific lock-in and a clean handover.
Your hosting, your rules
Deployed on infrastructure you choose, with EU hosting where compliance demands it, never trapped on someone else's servers.
Freedom to move
Because it is standard, owned software, you can change provider, scale or bring it in-house whenever you want.
And yes, we build with AI assistants ourselves — but under enterprise terms that never train on your code, we keep your production and personal data out of them, and your app and its data stay on EU infrastructure you own.
Lock-in is fine, until it is not
For a weekend experiment or a throwaway internal tool, lock-in does not matter. Use the platform, move fast, enjoy it. It only bites when that quick build quietly turns into something your business depends on. That is the moment to make sure you own it, before the cost of leaving grows with every new feature.
Read why custom software is suddenly a business caseWant software you actually own?
Whether you are starting fresh or sitting on an app trapped in a vibe platform, let's make sure the foundation is yours.