There is an arrangement common in professional services that is worth naming plainly. A directory or a marketing company builds you a website and charges you eighty to a hundred and fifty dollars a month. The site sits on their platform. The content lives in their database. Very often the domain is registered to them rather than to you.
Ten years of a hundred and twenty a month is north of fourteen thousand dollars, which is more than a multi-location site costs outright. At the end of it you own nothing. Stop paying and the site stops existing.
That is not an accident or a failure of the product. It is the product. The whole model depends on leaving being expensive, and it is expensive in a specific way: you do not just lose the site, you lose the addresses the pages sit at. Every link anybody ever made to you, every position those pages had accumulated in search, gone at once. So nobody leaves.
The second cost is harder to see and probably larger. Platform sites are templates. The same template is under a few thousand other businesses, with a different logo and different photographs of a different lobby. Go back to the four tabs: if your page is structurally the same page as the business in the next tab, the comparison is decided by something other than you.
Then there is what the arrangement does not do. In my experience reading these sites, the enquiry form posts into a system you do not control, the notification goes somewhere nobody watches, and there is no conversion event configured in any analytics account you can log into. You are paying monthly for a website whose output you cannot count.
Leaving is a smaller job than the model needs you to believe, and it turns on one thing: every address is preserved or redirected. That is what protects the position those pages have. A move done without redirects is exactly how businesses lose rankings, and it is the reason this is worth paying somebody to do rather than doing it on a Saturday.
The domain is usually recoverable. Where it is registered to the vendor it is normally a transfer request rather than a negotiation, and it is worth finding out which you are dealing with before you commit to anything. Where a domain genuinely cannot be recovered the answer is a new one with redirects, which is worse but survivable.
The order matters too. Nothing gets cancelled until the replacement is live. You give notice on your own timing, on a day you choose, with the new site already running and the old addresses already pointing at it.
What you end up with is unglamorous and worth having: a repository, hosting and an analytics account in your own name, created with you in the room, and a hosting bill of a few dollars a month instead of a subscription. If somebody else builds the next version of it, that is your decision to make rather than a hostage negotiation.
Moving off a platform onto your own domain, hosting and accounts, with every address preserved or redirected, is platform escape. If you would rather know first whether the content is worth moving, that is what the review is for.