r/buildbase

Disclosure: I build this (BuildBase), so I'm not neutral. But the topic is bigger than my tool and I think it's worth discussing here.

"All-in-one" makes engineers nervous, and rightly — one vendor owning your auth, billing, and data means a migration from hell if you ever want out. I have that fear too. So when I built the thing, I mapped the ownership boundaries before the features. Here's exactly what lives where:

Billing/subscription state → your own Stripe. It's bring-your-own-Stripe; the source of truth for money is an account you own and can walk away with. No revenue cut.
Users, workspaces, usage → reachable via an API-key layer. Everything the dashboard sees, you can pull into your own DB. The headless layer exists so you're not trapped behind my UI.
Your app logic + domain data → your database. The SDK doesn't own your product's tables.

Being straight about the rough edge: the one-click "export everything and leave" tooling isn't fully built yet. You can pull data via the API today, but I won't pretend the migration is frictionless — it's what I'm hardening next, because the way out has to be as clear as the way in.

Genuinely curious what the people here think:

When you evaluate an all-in-one tool, what's the lock-in test that makes or breaks it for you?
Is "BYO Stripe + headless API" enough to trust it, or does the missing one-click export kill it?
Anyone been genuinely burned by a tool you couldn't migrate off of?

I built an all-in-one SaaS backend — so I designed the "how to leave" before the features. Here's what I own vs what you own.