You’ve been running a managed server-side tracking service for 12 months. You cancel tomorrow. What happens to your conversion data? The answer depends entirely on who controls your infrastructure. Converge’s Terms of Service state it plainly: upon termination, the client shall no longer be entitled to use the Services to process personal data. That’s 12 months of conversion events, attribution data, and customer behaviour—access revoked the moment you stop paying.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s the question every WooCommerce store owner should ask before signing up for any managed tracking service.

The Cancellation Test: Data Ownership’s Moment of Truth

Every tracking service claims you own your data. The marketing pages say so. The sales calls promise it. But ownership isn’t tested when you’re paying—it’s tested when you stop.

75% of enterprises lack full visibility into third-party vendor data handling (Strata, 2025). If enterprise-level companies with legal teams can’t fully understand what happens to their data with vendors, what chance does a WooCommerce store owner have?

Here’s the thing: data ownership and data access are not the same. You might technically “own” your event data according to the terms of service. But if that data lives on someone else’s server and your access disappears at cancellation, ownership is a legal abstraction, not a practical reality.

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The Thought Experiment: 12 Months, Three Providers, One Question

Imagine you’ve accumulated 12 months of conversion data with each of these services. You decide to leave. Here’s what their own documentation tells you.

Converge: Access Ends at Termination

Converge Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation, acts as controller and joint controller with Converge Ltd in London. Their Terms of Service contain a critical clause: upon termination of the Agreement, the Client shall no longer be entitled to use the Services in order to process personal data.

That’s not ambiguous. Your 12 months of conversion events, your customer journeys, your attribution paths—you lose the ability to process or access them through the platform. Three years of service at $3,600/year represents $10,800 invested with no guarantee of data portability at exit.

Tracklution: Your Data, Their Infrastructure

Tracklution’s messaging is more reassuring on the surface. They state: “Your data remains 100% yours—we never claim any rights to it.” That’s a positive ownership claim. But the practical question remains: your data was processed and stored on their infrastructure. What format can you export it in? How complete is that export? What happens to the pipeline when you stop paying?

A data ownership claim without a clear data portability mechanism is a promise without a delivery plan.

Elevar: Google Cloud Processing

Elevar processes tracking through Google Cloud serverless infrastructure. The architecture question is: do your events live in Elevar’s Google Cloud project, or in yours? If the answer is theirs, then cancellation raises the same access questions. Your data ownership exists in principle but depends entirely on export capabilities you should verify before you need them.

Why Lock-In Happens Without Anyone Noticing

Average SaaS contract renewal rates exceed 90% (SaaS industry research, 2024). That’s not purely because every customer is satisfied. A significant portion of that renewal rate exists because switching costs—including data migration complexity—make leaving harder than staying.

Tracking services are uniquely sticky. Unlike swapping your email provider or project management tool, switching tracking services means potential gaps in your data timeline. The new service starts collecting from day one. The old service may or may not hand over what it collected. You end up with a hole in your conversion history right when you need continuity most.

With tracking services, the lock-in gradient looks like this:

• Fully locked: No export capability. Your data exists only on their infrastructure, accessible only through their interface.
• Partially locked: CSV or limited export available. You can extract some data, but not the complete event stream with all metadata.
• Fully portable: Your data lives in your own database. The service is a processing layer, not a storage layer. Cancel it and nothing changes about your stored data.

GDPR cumulative fines have reached €5.88 billion (GDPR Enforcement Tracker, 2025), making data processing agreements and portability rights increasingly critical. The regulation exists partly because this pattern—data access disguised as data ownership—was widespread enough to require legal intervention.

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The Architecture That Makes the Question Irrelevant

There’s a fundamentally different approach: build your tracking on infrastructure you control.

WordPress-native server-side tracking routes your events through your own server to destinations you own. Your conversion data flows into your MongoDB instance, your BigQuery dataset, your infrastructure. The tracking service is a courier—it moves data from point A to point B. The data lives at point B, which you own.

Cancel the courier and the packages already delivered don’t disappear.

If you cannot walk away with your complete data history in a format you control, you don’t own your data—you’re renting access to it.

Transmute Engine™ is built on this principle. It’s a first-party Node.js server running on your subdomain that routes events to your own BigQuery, MongoDB, or any destination you configure. The inPIPE WordPress plugin captures events and sends them to your Transmute Engine server. Cancel the service and your 12 months of data stays exactly where you put it—because it was always on your infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

• Read the termination clause, not just the marketing page. Converge ToS explicitly ends data processing access at cancellation.
• “Your data” means nothing without a portability mechanism. Ask: can I export my complete event history? In what format? Before I cancel?
• Three years at $3,600/year is $10,800 invested in a platform where data access isn’t guaranteed post-cancellation.
• WordPress-native architecture stores data on your infrastructure. The tracking plugin is a courier, not a vault. Cancel it and your data stays.
• The cancellation test is the only honest measure of data ownership. If your data disappears when you stop paying, you were renting, not owning.

Build on infrastructure you own. See how Seresa keeps your data where it belongs—on your server.