Made for Swiss self-employed & SMEs
The monthly subscription is the visible cost of an AI assistant. The invisible cost is how hard it becomes to leave. A year in, your chat history, your uploaded documents, your custom instructions and your team’s working habits all live inside one provider’s platform. For a Swiss SME or a self-employed professional, that quiet accumulation deserves a plan — not paranoia, just a handful of habits that keep the exit door open.
Where your data actually ends up
Modern AI tools are convenient precisely because they remember. The conversation history holds the context of your business: how you phrase offers, which tone you use with which client, what you decided last month. Uploaded files — drafts, contracts, meeting notes — often stay attached to those chats. Custom instructions, prompt libraries and configured assistants or agents live in the tool’s settings. Team plans add shared projects and knowledge bases. None of this is malicious; the product works exactly as designed. But it means the tool slowly becomes the only place where your way of working is written down.
What you can realistically export
The major providers do offer a data export, usually buried in the account settings. You typically receive a ZIP archive with your conversations and uploaded files, in JSON or HTML form. That is enough to read and to keep, but not enough to move: the formats are not standardised, and a conversation from one assistant does not slot neatly into another. Exports are also snapshots — whatever was discussed since your last download stays behind. And plenty of smaller tools offer no export at all.
Five habits that keep you free to switch
- Keep the masters on your own machine. The AI works on copies; the authoritative version of an offer, a letter or a process document lives in your own folder structure — and in your own backup, not inside a chat.
- Maintain a prompt library outside the tool. Your best prompts, custom instructions and style notes belong in a document you own. If they exist only on a settings page, a switch means rebuilding them from memory.
- Schedule a quarterly export. A recurring thirty-minute calendar entry: download the export, store it with your backups. Boring — and exactly the point.
- Save output in open formats. Markdown or plain text beats a proprietary project file you may not be able to open elsewhere.
- Check the exit before you buy. Before adopting a new AI tool, find the export function first. If there is none, decide consciously whether what you put in is something you can afford to leave behind.
The Swiss legal footnote
One honest caveat: the revised Swiss Data Protection Act, in force since September 2023, strengthens your information rights — but unlike the EU’s GDPR, it contains no explicit right to data portability. The law will not move your data for you. And for client data you process, you remain responsible no matter which tool holds it. Portability is a practical task, settled in contracts and habits rather than in court.
The one-evening exit test
Once a year, ask a simple question: if the subscription doubled tomorrow, or the terms changed in a way you cannot accept, could you move to another tool in a single evening? The chat history matters less than you think; the slow part is re-teaching the context — prompts, instructions, templates, habits. If all of that is stored on your side, the exit stays cheap. If it lives only in the tool, you do not own the workflow; the provider does.
“Convenience is what you buy. Portability is what you keep. Set up the exit before you fall in love with the tool.”
