The No-Moat Clause

So we escape SaaS vendor lock-in and become dependent on MoatBreak?

Fair question. It is the first one you should ask, and most of this industry does not answer it.

A company selling escape from lock-in has an obvious temptation. Make the extraction depend on a runtime only they ship. Keep the artefacts in a portal. Put the parity harness behind a subscription so the proof of correctness evaporates the month you stop paying. Each of those would make our business more defensible and would make you less free than you were before you called us.

So we wrote down what we will not do, and put it in the contract.

Everything lands in your repository, not ours

From day one, not on delivery. Open formats, human-readable, in version control you own.

What this means in practice: We work in a repository under your organisation, your access control and your retention policy. There is no MoatBreak portal that holds your artefacts and no staging environment where the work lives until it is paid for. Partial work in progress is still your work in progress. If the engagement stopped tomorrow, you would already have everything produced up to that point.

The parity harness is yours

It is source code, not a service. Your team runs it on your infrastructure without us in the loop.

What this means in practice: The harness is delivered as readable code with its test definitions, comparison rules and fixtures. It runs in your CI against your systems. It has no licence key, no phone-home, no usage metering and no dependency on any MoatBreak-hosted service. You can read it, modify it, extend it to systems we never touched, and keep running it after the engagement ends.

There is nothing proprietary in what we ship

No MoatBreak runtime, no MoatBreak file format, no hosted dependency. Airflow, dbt, Superset, Postgres. All of it standard, all of it yours.

What this means in practice: The delivered estate runs on open-source software you could have chosen without us. Our parsers and emitters are our tooling, used to produce your artefacts. The output does not import them, call them or need them at runtime. Any competent data engineering team, or any competitor, can pick up the delivered estate and continue. That is the test we hold ourselves to.

Thirty days' notice, no exit fee

If you stop paying us, you keep every artefact, every pipeline and every harness, and you lose no capability.

What this means in practice: Exit Readiness is cancellable on 30 days' written notice, with no termination charge, no minimum term beyond the current period and no clawback of anything delivered. Everything produced during the subscription stays yours under a perpetual, irrevocable licence. Nothing degrades, expires or stops working when the subscription ends. The only thing you lose is the ongoing regeneration of exit assets for changes made after you leave.

We will show you the MSA language first

Every clause on this page corresponds to specific language in our master services agreement. Ask for it during the Lock-In Index, before any money changes hands, and we will send the relevant sections. If a clause on this page is not in the contract we hand you, do not sign it.

We sell a way out of moats. It would be embarrassing to build one.