February 14, 2026

The exit interview: what happens when you leave your vendor

Every dealer website contract has an exit clause. Almost nobody reads it until it’s time to leave.

Here’s what happens across the seven platforms most dealers are on:

Dealer.com

30-day notice standard, 1–3 year contracts common. Content is theirs; export is a fee. Redirects for your top-ranking URLs are not provided. Historical lead data belongs to their CRM.

DealerInspire

60-day notice standard. Image library exports at a per-image cost. Custom template work stays with them; you get the content in a proprietary format that requires their toolchain to open.

DealerOn

30-day notice, similar terms to Dealer.com. Photo galleries can be exported but require a written request and take 30–45 days.

Sincro (formerly CDK)

Terms depend on which product family you’re on. Multi-year commitments common. Migration timelines can extend six months when the vendor is not motivated.

DealerFire

More favorable terms than most — they’ll cooperate with a migration, but you still don’t own the codebase.

CarsForSale.com

Month-to-month, no lock-in on the subscription. But your URL stays with them. Every dealer bookmark, every shared listing, every SEO backlink is on their domain — not exportable.

Zoomshop

Monthly. Cancel any time. You keep your domain. You keep your content. You keep your images. You keep your CRM data. We ship you SEO redirects from your top-ranking URLs so your search equity stays with you. If you leave in month 4, we’ll help you move to whatever’s next.

The exit clause tells you what the vendor actually thinks the relationship is. Ours says we think you should own the thing you paid us to build.