What you buy is not the automation. It is the dependency.

Every light switch in my apartment has a relay behind it. The front door has a motor. A custom board in the network cabinet connects all of it. None of it works.

The building was sold as a smart home. The company that wrote the software went bankrupt. The hardware stayed on the walls. The system left with the vendor. Nobody in the building can switch a light from their phone. The relays are fine. The thing they depended on is gone.

I spent a weekend taking the switches out, pairing them with my own hub and running it on a small server in the hallway. Half the apartment works again. My hardware, my configuration, documented.

I see the same pattern in companies. An agency rents its onboarding, its reporting, its handoffs from a tool. The tool changes pricing, gets acquired, or shuts down. The work is still there. The process is gone.

This is why everything I build runs in the client’s own cloud account, is documented, and is handed over to their team. If I disappear, the system does not.