What happens to your shop when a cloud POS shuts down

This is not a hypothetical risk and it is not an argument against cloud software in general. It is a specific question about a specific dependency: your shop's entire trading history, held on a server you do not control, reachable only through an application you do not own.

Three things happen to software companies, and all three land on you.

The three failure modes

The vendor closes

You typically get somewhere between thirty days and no notice at all. What you can retrieve in that window is whatever export they built, which is often a summary rather than the underlying records — enough to see totals, not enough to answer a question about a bill from last March.

The vendor is acquired

The product usually survives; the pricing rarely does. Acquisitions are followed by tier changes, feature reshuffles and per-user pricing on things that used to be included. Your leverage in that conversation is exactly your ability to leave, which is exactly what you do not have.

The pricing changes without an acquisition

The most common one. Reports move to a higher tier. Per-device charges appear. The plan you are on stops being offered and the one that replaces it costs more. Nothing has gone wrong; you simply cannot say no.

The uncomfortable question

Ask it plainly of whatever you are using now: if you stopped paying today, what would you still be able to read?

For most cloud POS products the answer is "nothing, after the grace period". Your sales history, your customer balances, your purchase records and your stock counts are all behind an application that stops opening.

That is a strange situation for records you are usually legally required to keep for several years.

Reducing the exposure without changing everything

If you are on a cloud product and staying, this is worth doing this month:

• Export everything now, not when you need it. Sales, products, customers, suppliers, purchases. Whatever the most detailed export is.
• Do it on a schedule — monthly is enough — and keep the files somewhere that is not the same laptop.
• Check the export is actually usable. Open it. Can you find a specific bill from three months ago and see its lines? If not, it is a summary, and a summary is not a record.
• Read what the contract says about termination and about your data after it.
• Write down what it would take to move. If you cannot answer that, you are not in a position to negotiate.

The other architecture

The alternative is software where the database is a file on the computer in your shop. It is not automatically better — it puts backups, hardware failure and physical security on you, and it means the shop's own machine has to be on for the extra counters to work.

What it does change is the failure mode. If the vendor disappears, the software you have installed keeps running, because there is nothing for it to phone. Your data is a file you can copy. Your history is readable with or without the company that sold it to you.

Whether that trade is worth making depends on the shop. It is worth making the trade consciously, which most shops never do, because the question is not usually asked during the sale.

What to insist on either way

Whatever architecture you choose:

• A one-click backup of everything, that you can take today and that produces a file you hold.
• An export detailed enough to answer a question about a single old bill.
• No feature you depend on for tax or compliance sitting behind a plan you might not renew.
• A written answer to "how do I move to a new computer", tested once before you need it.

Software should be replaceable. If it is not, it is not software you bought — it is a service you rent, and you should price it that way.

SalezFlow POS keeps your shop's database on your shop's computer, encrypted on disk, with a one-click full backup and spreadsheet exports of everything. If the connection dies, or we do, the till still opens. Read why it is built that way, or compare it with a cloud POS.