The exit promise
You can take everything out at any time, for free, even if you stop paying. This is one of the five promises the whole product is built to keep, and it is deliberately unconditional.
Reads stay open in every account state
No matter what is happening with your account — active, past due, suspended, or a vault that is soft-deleted and waiting to be purged — you can still read and export your data. A billing lapse can pause new backups, but it can never lock you out of the backups you already have. If a vault is on its way out, the dashboard shows a banner reaffirming this: reads are still open, so you can always export before anything is gone.
How to take everything out
Evacuating a vault works exactly like a restore — because it is one, just for everything:
- In centraid, point at the vault you want to evacuate using your gateway endpoint, an API key, and the vault id. If you no longer have the old API key value, create a new one — that does not affect your data.
- centraid requests short-lived, read-only permission and pulls every snapshot straight from storage.
- It unseals the data on your device using your encryption key.
There is no egress fee — no charge for reading your data back out — because the storage Clawgnition runs on does not bill for reads. Free exit is structural, not a limited-time offer.
You need your encryption key to actually use the data you export. The bytes you pull out are sealed. Wherever you take them, only your encryption key can open them — which is also why nobody but you can. If you have lost that key and every copy of it, the exported data cannot be read, and we cannot recover it. Guard your key. See Your keys.
You are not locked in by design
Two design choices make leaving genuinely easy rather than merely allowed:
- No code of ours in your app. There is no Clawgnition plugin or SDK to rip out. Your ability to read your data never depended on our software being installed.
- Your keys are yours. Because encryption happens on your device, you already hold everything needed to open your data anywhere — you are not waiting on us for anything.
What if Clawgnition went away?
We will be straight with you: no one can make promises about a hypothetical future beyond what the product guarantees today. What we can say is that the design is built to keep your exit open at all times. While the service is running you can evacuate every vault, for free, whenever you want — so the sensible move is simply to keep a current export if that risk worries you. And because your data is sealed with keys only you hold, no wind-down could ever expose your contents to anyone. The best protection against any provider disappearing is the one Clawgnition gives you by default: free exit and keys you control.
Common questions
Can I export if my payment lapsed?
Yes. Reads stay open in every account state. Paused billing can stop new backups, but never your ability to read and export what you have stored.
Does exporting cost anything?
No. Reading your data back — a single restore or a full evacuation — is always free and never metered.
What exactly do I get when I export?
Your sealed snapshots, which centraid unseals on your device with your encryption key and rebuilds into your vault. Keep your key safe or the export cannot be opened — see Your keys.
Do I need to tell you before I leave?
No. You can evacuate at any time without asking. If you also want to close the account or delete a vault afterwards, you can do that from the dashboard — see Billing & quota for how deletion is staged.