If your writing lives on someone else's server, in someone else's format, by someone else's rules — you do not own your writing. You are renting access to it.
The Trap
Every major writing platform stores your words in a proprietary database. Notion uses blocks in a cloud DB. Google Docs uses an internal format. Scrivener uses a binary project file.
Leaving costs you years of work. Export tools produce degraded copies — lost formatting, broken links, flattened structure. The more you invest in the tool, the more expensive it becomes to leave.
That is not a product. That is a trap.
The Zero Hostage Model
Every word you write in Wretify is saved to your own Google Drive as a plain Markdown file. Human-readable. Portable. Yours.
The folder structure mirrors your book structure: Wretify/Write/Books/[book-name]/chapter-slug.md. Open it in any text editor. Read it in 2035. No special software required.
If Wretify disappears tomorrow, you lose nothing. Not the words, not the structure, not the organizational intelligence. A future AI — Google's, Apple's, anyone's — can read, search, and surface your writing without Wretify.
Not Just Data Portability
Most apps offer "export." That is not the same thing. Export means: we hold your data, and when you want to leave, we give you a degraded copy.
Zero Hostage means: we never held your data in the first place. There is nothing to export because there was never a hostage situation.
The distinction matters because it changes the power relationship. You are not a user requesting your data back. You are an owner who happens to use a tool that reads your files.