What you should own on delivery day

Handover is a list, not a vibe. If the last conversation with a vendor is a handshake and a thank-you email, you do not own your project yet — you are merely renting the next few months of it. This is the checklist we actually run on delivery day, and the reasoning behind each line, because "you own everything" is only true when it is specific.

Accounts and access (the part people forget)

• Domain registrar: your account, your payment method, your recovery email. We work under delegated access or with you in the room; we do not hold domains hostage and we do not keep them "for convenience".
• Hosting panel: credentials rotated to you on handover if we ever held them; SSH/FTP users listed, with ours removed or re-keyed.
• Analytics and advertising: the GA4 property (and any ad accounts) live under your organization from day one. We are added as a collaborator, never as the owner. If measurement was set up as a dependency on us, that is a defect, not a relationship.
• Business email: mailboxes for your domain under your provider and your billing.

Files and sources

• Design sources: brand board, logo files in vector formats, palette and type references — the actual editable files, not screenshots.
• Code and content: the deployed site's files as delivered, plus the content in a form you can edit (CMS access or clean documents), with an export of structured data (quotes, invoices, contacts) in open formats (CSV/JSON).
• Asset inventory: images and fonts with their license status visible. Stock assets bought under your account stay under your account; anything we licensed stays documented so nobody is guessing in two years.

What legitimately stays with the studio

Very little, and none of it should block you: our internal templates and reusable component patterns, our process documents, and third-party licenses that are inherently tied to a seat or an account we hold (a font licensed to us cannot be resold to you — we either use one you can own or we tell you the cost up front). Paid products you buy in our store ship with their own license text, which is yours.

The right to keep going without us

Ownership includes capability. Every handover includes a walkthrough in your language (English or Spanish), the credentials inventory above in writing, and documentation of the boring but vital runs: how to publish a post, how to renew the domain, who to call when mail bounces. If running the site without us requires us, the handover is not finished — that is the line we use internally to decide when a project is actually closed.

Ask any vendor for this list before signing, not after launching. A team that flinches at "who owns the GA4 property?" has answered a more important question than price did.