Try most AI app builders and you’ll notice the same pattern. Your project lives on their infrastructure. Your database is a row in their multi-tenant cluster. Your deployment is a subdomain they control. Somewhere in the settings there’s an "export" button, offered the way a hotel offers a late checkout: technically available, quietly discouraged.

It works right up until it doesn’t. The tool raises its prices, or pivots, or gets acquired, or simply goes away. Suddenly the thing you spent six months building is a zip file you don’t know how to run.

If leaving is painful, you never really owned it.

The opposite bet

Yerma provisions nothing for itself. When you pick Supabase, we connect to your Supabase account over OAuth and create the project there. Same for GitHub, Vercel and Stripe. The bills come to you, the dashboards are yours, and the data never passes through a Yerma-owned resource.

Your first commit is authored in your repository, not copied there at the end. From the very first ticket, the project has a normal git history that any developer can clone, read and continue without ever installing Yerma.

What you can walk away with

  • The code, in a repository you already control, with real commit history.
  • The infrastructure, running in your own accounts, untouched if you cancel.
  • The blueprint: the spec the Architect wrote with you, exportable as plain markdown.
  • The decision log: every technical choice and the reasoning behind it, so the next developer inherits context instead of mystery.

Why we’d rather compete on merit

Lock-in is a way of keeping customers who would otherwise leave. It works, briefly, and it makes a product worse: when leaving is hard, shipping improvements gets less urgent.

We’d rather you stay because the Architect asks better questions than anyone else, because the stack picker explains trade-offs you actually understand, and because the agents ship code you’re not embarrassed by. If we stop earning that, you should be able to leave on a Tuesday afternoon and lose nothing.

That’s the whole design, and it ships with the beta, macOS first. The waitlist is below.