What it actually costs to leave a branding tool
Every alternatives page is written to make switching look cheap, ours included. Here are the six costs that never appear on them, the ones we would pay and the ones you would, and the case for staying where you are.
An alternatives page has one job, and it is not to help you decide. It is to make the decision feel already made. So the costs of moving are either absent or reduced to a line about how easy the import is.
We publish six of those pages, with a rule that each has to carry a "stay where you are" case the record will not build without. This post is that section pulled out and made general, because the specific costs of switching are the same across the category and nobody enumerates them.
The six costs
1. Exported assets stop being editable
Everything comes out as a PNG, a JPG or a flattened PDF. That is portable and it is not a working file. The moment you need the same carousel with one slide changed, you are not editing your asset — you are rebuilding it somewhere new, from the picture of it.
How to size it: count the assets you would genuinely need to revise rather than the ones you have. For most people it is a much smaller number than the export folder implies, and that makes this cost smaller than it feels.
2. Templates do not travel, and they are the thing you actually built
A year in a tool is not a year of assets. It is a year of accumulated decisions — this crop, this type size, this spacing — encoded in templates that exist only in that tool's format.
This is the real cost and it is the one nobody lists. It is also the argument for holding your brand as a description rather than as a set of files: a palette with role names, a type pairing, and a written voice all move by being retyped. A template does not move at all. That is the entire case for a brand kit as decisions rather than files, and it is worth applying to us too — if leaving Repic meant losing something unportable, that would be a mark against us.
3. Your voice guide is in somebody's head
Most small teams never wrote it down. The person who has been publishing simply knows what the brand sounds like. That knowledge does not transfer with the account, and it does not transfer to a new hire either, which means this cost is being paid continuously and only becomes visible during a move.
If you take one action from this post, make it writing the voice down — say what it says, and what it refuses to say. That is portable, it survives the tool, and it survives the person. Six branding words used to avoid a decision covers why "friendly, professional and approachable" does not count.
4. The scheduled queue
Anything already queued has to be rebuilt or the calendar has a hole in it. This one is genuinely annoying and genuinely temporary: it is bounded by how far ahead you schedule, and it is over the moment the queue drains.
Do not let a two-week cost decide a two-year question. It is the most vivid item on this list and the least important.
5. Learned muscle memory
You know where everything is. The new thing will be slower for a fortnight and it will feel like evidence that the move was wrong.
It is not evidence of anything. It is the cost of any move and it expires. Naming it in advance is most of the defence, because the feeling arrives on day three and gets attributed to the tool.
6. Whatever your integrations were doing
Anything wired to the old tool — a scheduler, a drive, a Zap — stops. This is worth a genuine inventory before you commit, because it is the one item that can turn out to be much bigger than expected, and the only way to find out is to list them.
The costs that are not real
Two things get counted as switching costs and are not.
What you have already spent. It is gone whether you stay or leave. If the tool is wrong, a year of subscription is an argument for moving sooner, not for staying longer. This is the sunk-cost fallacy in its most expensive everyday form and it keeps more people in the wrong tool than any feature.
Your published archive. It is already published. Nothing about switching removes it or makes it worse.
The case for staying, which we mean
Our alternatives pages carry this section by rule, so here it is generally.
Stay if the thing that is wrong is not the tool. The most common reason output feels generic is that the brand behind it was never decided — no position, no audience, nothing refused. Moving tools does not fix that, and the new tool will produce equally generic work faster. That is a real case and it argues against buying anything, including from us.
Stay if you are mid-launch. The worst time to change how you produce work is while you are producing a lot of it. There is a version of this decision that costs almost nothing and it is the one taken in a quiet fortnight.
Stay if your current tool is genuinely better at the one thing you do most. A tool that only makes carousels but makes the best ones, for someone who only publishes carousels, is not the wrong choice because it is narrow. Breadth is a benefit to people who need breadth.
Stay if the switching cost is item 3 and you have not written the voice guide. Write it first. Then the move is cheap, and you may find you no longer want to make it — which would also be a good outcome.
How to actually decide
Not by reading comparison pages, ours included. The method that works:
- Write your own criteria before you read anybody's table. Their categories are chosen to favour them; this is the single highest-leverage step and almost nobody does it. How to read a comparison page, including ours goes through the mechanisms.
- Price the six costs above for your situation specifically. Most people find two are real and four are much smaller than they felt.
- Test the new thing on real work in parallel, for two weeks, without cancelling anything. Running two subscriptions briefly is cheap next to a bad move.
- Then decide, on the parallel run rather than on anyone's page.
The alternatives guides are useful for step one, as raw material for your own criteria. They are not a decision procedure, and neither is this.
For step three specifically, the six tools that need no signup let you run a parallel test on real work without buying anything, which is the cheapest possible version of this decision.
On the money specifically: none of the pages you are comparing will tell you what they charge in a way you can trust six months from now, which is why ours carry pricing MODELS rather than figures. Why we publish nobody's prices, including our own makes that argument and admits what it costs. And if you are trying to work out whether the tool you are leaving for is genuinely better at your particular job, seven tools that beat us is the list arranged so our bias works against us.