How to leave Groundbase

You can take everything out of Groundbase at any time, from Settings → Backup & export, without asking me. And the parts of your business that would be hardest to move, your phone numbers, your email and your card payments, were never inside Groundbase in the first place.

Groundbase is built by one person, so the fair question is what happens to your data if you want to go, or if I'm not around. The answer shouldn't be a promise. It should be a button, a description of what comes out of it, and a set of accounts that are already in your name. This post is all three.

The parts that were always yours

Groundbase connects to your own accounts rather than standing in for them. That's a design decision, and leaving is where it pays off.

• Your phone numbers are on your Twilio account. Groundbase talks to Twilio on your behalf, but the numbers, the bill and the US carrier registration are yours. Groundbase never releases a number at Twilio, from any screen, any background job or an account deletion. If you disconnect, the numbers go back to the call and text routing they had before you connected them, where Groundbase recorded it. Your clients keep texting the number they already have.
• Your email is in your own mailbox. Groundbase connects to Gmail, Outlook or any other mailbox over IMAP and SMTP, and sends from your own address. The mail lives with your email provider. Leave, and your inbox is exactly where it was.
• Your payments are in your own Stripe. Invoice and quote payments go through Stripe Connect as direct charges: your customer pays your Stripe account, and Groundbase never holds the money or takes a percentage. Your payment history is in Stripe whether or not you keep Groundbase.
• Your campaign email goes through your own Resend account, sending from your own domain. That stays with you too.

So leaving Groundbase doesn't mean porting a phone number, migrating a mailbox or changing how you get paid. It means taking the records that tie them together, which is the export.

The export

Settings → Backup & export, on the web app or the Windows desktop app. There are two kinds of file.

A spreadsheet for each kind of record. Contacts, companies, deals and tasks each download as a CSV that opens in Excel or Google Sheets. The contacts file uses the same column names Groundbase's own import recognises, and includes tags, the primary address and whether each person has opted out of texts or email. From the Contacts list, you can also select rows and export just those.

Export everything (JSON). One file with every record in your account:

• Contacts, companies, deals and tasks
• Notes, tags and custom fields, the values and the fields you invented
• Texts and emails
• Calls, with references to their recordings
• Campaigns and workflows
• Invoices and payments
• Meeting types from your booking page

Your connected accounts and their passwords and keys are deliberately not in it. A backup ends up in a Downloads folder or an email attachment, and it shouldn't carry the keys to your Twilio, your mailbox or anything else.

If any part of your account couldn't be read when the file was made, the file says so at the top. A partial backup never passes for a complete one.

It works when you're not paying

The export button is there during the free trial, so you can put data in, take it out and look at the file before you've paid anything.

It's also there after you stop paying. Cancelling stops the billing and deletes nothing: you keep the app until the end of the period you paid for, then there's a 30-day window where reactivating picks up exactly where you left off, and your data is still there after that. If a card payment fails and Stripe gives up retrying, the app shows a billing screen, and export stays available the whole time.

Putting it back

The same screen restores a JSON export, in one of two ways:

• Merge adds anything from the file that isn't already in your account and leaves the rest alone. Restoring your own backup twice changes nothing.
• Replace deletes your records and loads the file in one step. If anything in the file fails, nothing changes.

Either way, two things survive on purpose: your do-not-text list and your email unsubscribes. Someone who told you to stop after the backup was taken has to stay stopped, and a restore can't undo that.

A restore only ever writes into the account that runs it, whatever the file says. A backup from one account can't be loaded into another.

Leaving, step by step

1. Export. Take the JSON file, and the CSVs if you're moving to a tool that imports spreadsheets.
2. Keep your call recordings if you want them. The export holds references to them. The audio itself is in your Twilio account, and you can download it from there.
3. Cancel in Settings → Account & billing, on the web or desktop app. It opens Stripe's billing page.
4. Point your numbers at your next tool, or leave them where they are. They're on your Twilio account either way.
5. Delete your account, if you want it gone. Settings → Backup & export → Danger zone → Delete my account. It asks for your password, your two-factor code if you use one, and the word DELETE. It's immediate, with no undo, and it removes your records and the calendar and mailbox connections you set up. Your Twilio account and its numbers are not touched. Copies in Groundbase's database backups age out within 90 days.

What the export doesn't do

• It moves your records, not your setup. Another CRM won't read your Groundbase workflows and campaigns and rebuild them. The data comes across; the automation you rebuild by hand.
• Recordings are references, not audio files. They live in Twilio, as above.
• Document PDFs and campaign images aren't in the file. Groundbase stores those as files, and the export carries each document's details and signing history, not the PDF itself. Download the signed copies you want to keep before you go. Email attachments stay in your own mailbox.
• It's a button, not a schedule. If you want a copy every month, export one every month.

Why it's built this way

I'd rather you knew all of this before you signed up than found it out when you needed it.

There's also a plainer reason. I'm one person, and the only way that's a fair thing to sell is if leaving is easy. A CRM you can't get out of keeps customers for the wrong reason. If Groundbase stops being worth $19 a month to you, you should be able to take everything and go in an afternoon.

The same thinking runs through the rest of the product. The calls and texts run on your own Twilio, the email on your own mailbox, the payments on your own Stripe, and your AI assistant connects to Groundbase rather than being sold to you by it. Groundbase is the layer that ties them together for one person: one pipeline, your contacts, your bookings, invoices, documents and workflows, on one plan. Nothing in that plan is held back for a higher tier, and nothing in it is held hostage.

Try it, then try leaving

Groundbase is $19 a month or $199 a year. There's a 14-day free trial; the card goes in up front and isn't charged until day 15. Export works in the trial, so the best test of everything above is to import a few contacts, export them, and open the file. Who Groundbase is and isn't for is worth reading before you start.

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Questions about this one? Email me directly: blog-export@groundbasecrm.com — I read every one.