A fair question for any early-stage vendor — and one Kola is structurally built to answer better than a SaaS CRM ever could.
Kola CRM is a file that lives on your server, not ours. If Chestnut Compute shut down tomorrow, your CRM keeps running exactly as it does today. Your data never touched our servers to begin with. You can export everything to CSV at any time — that right is written into our Terms and can't be revoked. The app is also built to keep working if our license servers are ever unreachable. You're protected in ways no subscription CRM can match — because their data disappears with them.
Fair concern — here's why Kola is structurally different from a SaaS vendor risk:
The software is a file you possess. When you buy Kola, you receive a self-contained application that runs on your own server. It checks in with our licence server when it loads, but it doesn't need us to stay alive — it functions independently of us. If we went dark, that check would simply fail quietly, your team logs in tomorrow and nothing has changed.
Your data is on your server. We have no access to your CRM data. Contacts, deals, notes, activity history — all stored on infrastructure you control. There's nothing for us to "take with us."
Export is a contractual right. Our Terms guarantee CSV export of all data permanently and irrevocably — it survives our cessation, any acquisition, any version change.
We document the exit path. If we ever discontinue Cloud Backup or wind down, our Terms commit us to at least 90 days notice, your backup files available for download during that period, and a full refund of your current Cloud Backup year.
Compare that to a typical SaaS CRM: if they shut down, your data is inaccessible from day one. With Kola, the worst case is you stop getting updates. That's a very different kind of risk.
We're an early-stage company — we won't pretend otherwise. What we will say is that the product is designed so your dependence on us is minimal by design. You own the software file. You host it. You control the data. The things you need from us are the initial product, minor updates, and optional support. If we ever stopped operating, none of those would affect your ability to run your business tomorrow. We've built Kola to make our failure a very minor inconvenience — not a business emergency.
We'd rather answer this up front than have you wonder about it later.