What happens to your tests when your QA vendor shuts down
Testing platforms are easy to start and hard to leave. Three questions to ask before your suite lives on someone else's servers.
The Bright Apps team··5 min read
In April 2026, the AI testing company Octomind announced it was shutting down. The service ended in May. Its customers were asked to export their tests, and they could: the platform generated standard Playwright code, so the suites could run anywhere.
That’s the good version of this story. Not every vendor shuts down, and not every vendor stores your tests in a format you can take with you. If yours didn’t, a shutdown, a price change or an acquisition would leave you rebuilding your suite on someone else’s schedule.
Rented tests vs owned tests
Most testing platforms work on a rental model. Your tests live in their editor, run on their infrastructure and are billed per run, per seat or per test. That’s convenient on day one: nothing to set up, a dashboard out of the box.
The cost shows up later:
- Leaving is a rewrite. Tests recorded in a proprietary format don’t run anywhere else.
- Usage pricing punishes good habits. Running the suite on every pull request is exactly what you want, and exactly what a per-run price discourages.
- Your developers can’t fix them. When a test lives outside the repo, it’s someone else’s job to update it, and it falls behind the code.
Owned tests are plain code in your repository. They run on your CI minutes, they’re reviewed in the same pull requests as the features they test, and they keep working whether or not you keep paying anyone.
Three questions to ask your vendor (or yourself)
- If we cancel today, what do we keep? “An export” isn’t an answer. Ask what format, and whether it runs without their platform.
- Where do the tests run? On your CI, or on their servers? If it’s theirs, what happens to your deploys when they’re down?
- Who can change a test? If a developer renames a button, can they fix the test in the same pull request?
If the answers are “nothing”, “their servers” and “only through their editor”, you’re renting.
Why we hand over the suite
This is why every Sanity Suite we build is written in a standard framework, usually Playwright, lives in your repo and runs in your CI. Maintenance is optional. If you cancel it, nothing breaks: the suite keeps running and your team can extend it.
The goal isn’t to make leaving us easy as a gesture. It’s that tests nobody on your team can read or change aren’t really protecting you.