The code we write for your business belongs to you. This is standard for custom software work: whatever gets built to fit one company's process, data and tools is that company's property, not something we resell or reuse elsewhere. What we keep is our own general-purpose scaffolding, the internal frameworks and patterns we built before your engagement and apply again on the next one, the same way any studio keeps its own toolbox.
Because we run systems rather than just handing them off, the code isn't sitting on a shelf waiting for a handover, it's live, connected to real tools and producing real output. We build agents into the accounts your business already has (your own email, CRM, ad platform, database), so ownership of those accounts and the data inside them was never in question. If an engagement ends, what actually needs transferring is the source repository, documentation of how the system is meant to behave, and any credentials we provisioned specifically to run it.
The honest limit is that someone has to be able to run the thing afterward. An agentic system that retries, checks its own output and escalates edge cases needs monitoring and occasional fixing, not a one-time install. If you have no engineer or vendor lined up to take that on, ending the engagement usually means the automation stops working within days or weeks, not that it keeps running for free. If you want the code but not the ongoing operation, that tradeoff is worth spelling out before the project starts, not after.