How to leave Groundbase

Groundbase is built by one person. The reasonable response to that is "what happens to my data if you disappear?" — and the reasonable answer is not a paragraph about my commitment to the journey. It's an export button and a description of exactly what comes out of it.

So here's how to leave. I'd rather you knew before you signed up than found out when you needed it.

The short version

Settings → Backup & export. Two things live there:

• CSV per entity — contacts, companies, deals, tasks. One file each, opens in Excel or Sheets, no transformation needed.
• Export everything — a single JSON file containing every row in your account.

No support ticket, no waiting period, no "contact us to discuss your options." It's a button, and it works on the trial as well as a paid account.

What "everything" actually means

Vendors love the word "everything." Mine covers 38 tables, and it's worth listing the parts people assume get left behind:

• Contacts, companies, deals, tasks — with their addresses and pipeline stages
• Notes and the full activity log — every logged interaction, not just the records
• Your custom fields and their values — the schema you invented, plus the data in it
• Saved views — your filters, not just your rows
• Every SMS and email message, with threads and attachments
• Call history — including voicemail transcripts and recording URLs
• Your automations — workflows with their run history, sequences with their steps and enrollments
• Webhooks — subscriptions and their delivery logs
• Templates, meeting types, tags, and your opt-out list

That last one matters more than it looks. If someone told you to stop texting them, that's a legal obligation that has to survive the move. It's in the export.

Import it back

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

• Merge — insert what isn't already there, leave the rest alone
• Replace — wipe the account and restore the file over it

Restore forces every row's owner to be you, regardless of what's in the file. That means you can't restore someone else's export into your account, and it means a file you exported two years ago still lands correctly today.

There's also a reset to empty if you want to clear the account and start over — which is really the same machinery pointed at an empty payload.

The part where I admit the export was broken

For a while, this export was incomplete. Call history wasn't in it. Neither were workflows, sequences, webhooks, or booking types.

I found out sideways. The "reset to empty database" button uses the same table list as the export, and after a reset, old rows were still visible in the app. The reset wasn't the bug — the list was, and it had been quietly shortening the export the whole time.

Anyone who exported before that fix got a file missing their automations and their entire calling history, and wouldn't have known unless they went looking. I'd rather write that down than let you assume this feature was born correct. If you exported a backup a long time ago, take a fresh one.

The list now lives in one place and drives export, restore, and reset together, so the three can't drift apart again. That's the actual fix — not adding the missing tables, but making it impossible for them to go missing separately.

Your AI can pull it too

The MCP server exposes contacts, companies, deals, tasks, notes and more as tools, so "export my contacts to a spreadsheet" is something you can ask Claude to do rather than a thing you click. Same data, different door.

What this doesn't solve

Being straight about the limits of a data export:

• It's your data, not your setup. A competitor won't import your Groundbase sequences and rebuild them. Records move cleanly; automation logic you rebuild by hand.
• Recording URLs are links, not files. Call recordings live in Twilio, on your own account. The export tells you where they are — download them from Twilio if you want the audio itself.
• No scheduled automatic backups. Export is on-demand. If you want a monthly copy, that's a calendar reminder, not a feature. I'd rather ship the honest button than a backup scheduler I haven't tested against a real disaster.

Why this is the post rather than a promise

Every solo-founder product gets asked the bus question, and most answer it with sentiment. Sentiment isn't a migration path.

The version I can actually offer: the data is yours, it comes out in one click, in formats that other tools read, including the parts that are inconvenient for me to hand over — your message history, your automations, your opt-out list. If Groundbase stops being worth $9 a month to you, I'd rather you left cleanly than felt stuck. A CRM that's hard to leave is just hostage-taking with a nicer UI.

That's also the honest reason it's built this way: I'm one person, and the only way that's a fair thing to sell you is if leaving is easy.

Try it

Groundbase is $9/month flat with a 14-day trial. Export works during the trial too — you can put data in and take it back out before you've paid anything. (Who it's for, and who it isn't.)

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