This is not a reason to avoid tools. It is a reason to know, before you adopt one, what happens to your business when that day arrives.
The thing you lose is not the software
Software is replaceable. There is always another product doing roughly the same job, and switching costs a weekend of irritation.
What is frequently not replaceable is what accumulated inside it. Three years of customer records. The history of what you sold to whom. Your email list. The content you wrote. The photographs of completed work. The record of which invoice covered which job.
That is the actual exposure, and it is invisible while everything is working. A business evaluating tools on features is evaluating the part that does not matter.
The question is not whether the tool is good. It is what you are holding inside it, and whether you could take that somewhere else on a Tuesday afternoon without asking anybody for help.
The test to apply before adopting anything
One question, asked before you commit rather than when you want to leave.
Can I export everything I put into this, in a format something else can read, by myself?
Not whether the feature exists on the marketing page. Whether you have run it, opened the file, and confirmed it contains what you would need. Do that in the first month, while you have nothing to lose and the answer costs you nothing.
Businesses discover during an actual migration that the export omits attachments, or drops the history, or produces a format nothing else accepts, or requires contacting support and waiting. By that point you have no position from which to object, and the choice is between staying somewhere you no longer want to be and abandoning the data.
Two layers, two levels of caution
Not everything deserves the same scrutiny, and treating it all equally produces either paralysis or carelessness.
The foundation. Your domain, your email, your accounting records, your customer list, and your website. These hold things that cannot be recreated and would take months to rebuild. Here the correct instinct is boring: widely used, long established, easy to leave, and registered in your own name rather than somebody else's account.
Everything above it. Scheduling, design, project tracking, social posting, whatever else. These hold little of permanent value and can be replaced in a weekend. Here you can experiment freely, because the cost of being wrong is a weekend.
The failure is applying foundation level caution to a scheduling tool while treating your customer list as something that lives wherever was convenient.
Two businesses use the same platform, which is acquired and shut down with ninety days notice. The first exported its customer list quarterly to its own storage and knows what it holds. It picks a replacement, imports, and loses an afternoon. The second discovers that the export produces a format nothing accepts, that photographs were never included, and that four years of job history exists only inside a product that is closing. The difference was not foresight about this particular company. It was a habit that cost ten minutes a quarter.
Separate the things that should not fail together
Bundling is convenient and it couples things that should be independent.
Your domain registered with your web host means a dispute with the host becomes a dispute about your address. Your email included with your website platform means changing the website threatens your email. A single provider holding your domain, your site, your email, and your customer records means one relationship going wrong takes all four.
Three providers instead of one costs a few extra logins and converts a potential crisis into an inconvenience. This is the same reasoning as not keeping every business record in one place, and it is unglamorous in exactly the same way.
What to do when it does happen
Usually you get notice, and the mistake is spending most of it deciding.
Export everything on the day you hear, before doing anything else. Access sometimes degrades before the final date, and support becomes slower as everybody else asks the same questions. Get the data out while the company is still functioning, then evaluate replacements with the material already in your possession.
Then take the opportunity rather than only the loss. A forced migration is the one moment you will genuinely audit what is in there, and businesses routinely find that half of what they were carrying was never used. Moving less is faster than moving everything.
The habit that makes all of this cheap
Once a quarter, export your customer list, your email subscribers, and your financial records to storage you control. It takes ten minutes and you will almost certainly never need any of it.
The value is not the file. It is that you are no longer dependent on any one company continuing to exist, continuing to price reasonably, and continuing to want your business. That is a position worth holding whether or not anything ever goes wrong, and it is available to any business willing to spend forty minutes a year on it.