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. We also commit in writing to publishing a bypass key on GitHub in any planned wind-down, so license validation never blocks you. 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 doesn't phone home to stay alive — it functions independently of us. If we went dark, 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. In a planned wind-down, we commit to: 90 days notice, full data export delivered to your email, pro-rated refund on Cloud Backup, and a public bypass key posted to GitHub so license validation never blocks you.
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.