You’ve decided you don’t need the tool anymore. You go to cancel. And somewhere in the cancellation flow — after the discount offer, after the “are you sure,” after the pause option — there’s a line that stops you: “You’ll lose access to your files.”
Your files. Still there. On their servers. But behind the paywall.
This is not an edge case. It’s the logical endpoint of a particular kind of product design: one where the value is not just the tool but the accumulation. Your documents. Your history. Your processed files, stored in their system, retrievable through their interface, useful as long as you keep paying. The moment you stop, the accumulated value becomes inaccessible. Not deleted — usually — just behind the door.
There’s a word for this. Economists call it lock-in. It’s the difference between a tool and a custody arrangement. When you pay for Netflix, you’re paying for access to content you don’t own. That’s explicit. You know that. When you pay for a PDF tool that stores your files, you’re doing something similar, except nobody told you at the start that your outputs would become collateral.
Think about what gets uploaded to cloud-based productivity tools. Not just PDFs — drafts, revisions, signed contracts, scanned documents, filed forms. Work product. The record of decisions made, things agreed to, work completed. Over time, this accumulates into something that has real value, not because of any single file but because of the whole archive. And the archive is sitting on someone else’s infrastructure, accessible to you on a conditional basis, with the condition being an ongoing monthly payment.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a business model. Cloud storage has genuine benefits — access from multiple devices, automatic backup, collaboration. For many tools, storing your work makes sense. The question is whether you understood the terms when you started, and whether “your files” are really yours.
The hostage dynamic — that’s a strong word, but it’s the accurate one — emerges from the gap between how services are marketed and how they work at exit. They’re marketed on the value they provide. They work, at exit, on the cost of leaving. The cost of leaving is your history. Your accumulated work. The two years of files you’d have to somehow export, organise, and store somewhere else, if you could figure out how to export them, which is also often made inconvenient.
Software built without a server doesn’t have this problem. If the processing happens locally, there’s nothing to store remotely, because there’s no remote. Your files are on your machine. They were always on your machine. The tool ran on your machine and left. When you stop using it, your files don’t go anywhere — they’re already where they are. There’s no accumulated value to hold, no archive to threaten, no custody arrangement to maintain.
The output of a locally-processed tool is just a file. Your file. On your device. In whatever folder you put it. Accessible from any application that can open that format, without requiring a subscription, without requiring the original tool to still exist, without requiring the company that made the tool to still be in business.
Permanent software. The kind that does a job and then gets out of the way.
With fwip, your files stay on your device. There’s nothing to lose when you leave. Try it →