Years ago I stopped registering domains for clients. Not because it was hard — because I realized I'd accidentally built a small trap. The client couldn't leave me even if they wanted to. Their domain, their hosting, the keys to their own business, all sat in an account with my name on it. I'd told myself that was service. It was actually a leash, and I was holding the other end.
So I cut it. Now the rule is simple and it doesn't bend: the client owns everything. The domain, the accounts, the credentials, the whole stack. I'll set it up, I'll manage it while we work together, but it's in their name from day one. If they want to walk away tomorrow and take it all with them, they can, with no phone call to me required.
People assume that's bad for business. It's the opposite.
Handcuffs are a tell
When a vendor makes it hard to leave, that's information. It usually means the work can't hold the client on its own merits, so the relationship has to be enforced structurally instead — locked accounts, proprietary systems, a migration that would cost more than it's worth. The handcuffs are an admission that without them, you'd go.
I'd rather the work do the holding. If you stay, I want it to be because the thing I built keeps earning its place and because calling me is genuinely the easiest way to solve your next problem — not because leaving is a nightmare you've decided to avoid.
“Build a thing people can leave, and the ones who stay are staying for the right reason.”
What you're actually delivering
Here's the reframe that changes how you scope every project: the deliverable isn't the website, or the report, or the strategy deck. The deliverable is the client standing on their own afterward, more capable than they were when they started. The artifact is just the residue of that.
Which means the handoff isn't the boring administrative end of the project. It is the project. Everything before it — the build, the revisions, the late nights — is a draft of the thing you're really there to produce, which is a client who doesn't need you and chooses you anyway.
That's a higher bar than "ship the site." It's also the only version of this work I've found that I can do for twenty years without it curdling into something I'm ashamed of. Build capability, not dependency. The people who get that become clients for life — not because they're stuck, but because they're not.
