Switching from Hibu, Scorpion or Townsquare: what you keep

Start with the sentence nobody wants to hear

You almost certainly do not know your own contract terms. That is not a criticism — it was signed years ago by a rep who has since left, and the platform vendors do not publish terms on their websites. We checked Hibu, Scorpion and Townsquare Interactive on 2 September 2026: none of the three publishes a price or a minimum term on its public site. Scorpion's public pages are about its preferred-vendor arrangements with field-service software and trade associations, not about what it charges you.

So step one of switching is not design. It is: find your signed agreement and read five lines of it.

1. What is the minimum term, and what is today's date relative to it?
2. Does it auto-renew, and how many days' written notice does cancelling require?
3. On cancellation, do you keep the website?
4. Who is the registrant of the domain?
5. What happens to the phone number if it is a tracking number they provisioned?

If you cannot find the agreement, email your account manager and ask for a copy in writing. That request is also a useful test: how fast someone answers tells you what the next twelve months look like.

Why this class of vendor is structured this way

It helps to understand the machine you are inside. Hibu sells through outside sales representatives who prospect a territory and visit businesses in person. Townsquare Interactive is the small-business digital arm of a radio broadcaster, fed by its stations' local sales force. Scorpion is not chasing your inbox at all — it gets named the preferred marketing provider inside the software and associations you already belong to.

All three carry a real, human cost of acquiring you. That cost has to be recovered, which is why the monthly figure is high and the term is long. It is a rational business model. It is just not one that is optimised around you being able to leave.

One timing note worth knowing if you are a Townsquare client: trade press reported in early 2026 that the company restructured its sales organisation with roughly 40% fewer people, with management saying it intended to rebuild. If your account manager has gone quiet and been replaced twice, that is the context. Treat it as reported trade coverage rather than a company statement — but if you have noticed the service change, you were not imagining it.

The inventory: what you are actually trying to keep

A "website" from a bundled provider is usually six things in a trench coat. Before you touch anything, write down who controls each one.

• The domain name. The single most important item. Look it up yourself at ICANN Lookup and see whose name is on it. If the registrant is your vendor rather than your business, that is the first thing to fix and it can take weeks.
• DNS. Which nameservers your domain points at. This is the switch that makes a cutover happen, and whoever controls it controls the timing.
• Email. If your business email runs on the same hosting as the site, moving the site can take the email down. Establish this before you plan anything.
• The content. Your text, your photographs, your service pages, your customer reviews if they are quoted on the site.
• Google Business Profile. Check whether your vendor is listed as an owner or a manager. You want your business to be the primary owner. Anyone else should be a manager you can remove.
• Tracking phone numbers. If the number on your site, your van and your business cards is a number the vendor provisioned, cancelling can mean losing it. This is the trap that hurts most.

What "a static export" means, and why to ask for one

You will hear the phrase "we'll give you your files." Ask which files, because there are two very different answers.

A static export is the built website as plain files: the HTML pages, the stylesheets, the images, the fonts. It is what a browser actually downloads when someone visits you. It is self-contained, needs no database and no licence, and can be dropped onto any ordinary hosting account. If you have one, you can never be held hostage — the worst case is you pay somebody a small amount to upload a folder.

A content export is your text and images in some other format — a spreadsheet, a database dump, a proprietary backup file. Useful, but it is ingredients rather than a meal. It usually requires the vendor's own platform to become a website again.

Ask for both, in writing, before you cancel. "Do I receive a complete static export of the site, and how long after cancellation?" is a fair question and a revealing one. Some vendors say yes plainly. Others are more candid than you expect in the other direction: one small-business web company states on its own page that the design and code remain its property for as long as you are a client; another prices a buyout of your own site at $4,800 with your paid fees credited only up to $3,500; a third publishes a clawback that bills you the difference to its $3,800 standard price if you leave inside twelve months. And an auto-repair vendor states plainly that all backend changes are required to be done on your end — read that as a description of what you can and cannot control.

For what it is worth, ours is published: cancel any month by email, no exit fee, and a full static export within ten business days, free. That is on our exit page and in sections 7 and 9 of the agreement. Whoever you buy from, get the equivalent sentence in writing.

The thirty-day overlap

Here is the single most useful operational rule in this whole guide: do not cancel the old provider on the day you launch the new site. Overlap them by at least thirty days.

The overlap costs you one more month of a bill you were already paying. In exchange it buys you:

• A rollback. If the cutover goes wrong at 4 p.m. on a Friday, you can point the domain back and be trading again in an hour.
• Time for search engines and directories to catch up. Redirects need to be crawled. Listings need to be updated. None of that is instant.
• The chance to find what you forgot. Every switch turns up something: a form that emailed an address nobody checks, a landing page a paid campaign still points at, a PDF price list linked from a Facebook post in 2019.
• Email safety. Mail routing is the thing that goes wrong quietly. Thirty days is enough to notice that a supplier's messages stopped arriving.

The correct order is: build the replacement privately, get everything in the inventory into your own name, publish the new site, watch it for thirty days, then cancel. Never the reverse. A provider who wants you to cancel first, before the replacement exists, is asking you to take a risk that is entirely theirs to carry.

A realistic sequence

1. Week 0. Find the contract. Note the term, the notice period and the cancellation clause. Run the ICANN lookup.
2. Week 1. Get the domain into an account in your business's name. Get yourself made primary owner of the Google Business Profile. Do not tell anyone you are leaving yet — these are things you should own regardless.
3. Weeks 1–3. Build the replacement at a private address. Nothing public changes.
4. Week 4. Approve it. Map every old page to a new one so links keep working. Move the DNS. The site changes; the domain and the email do not.
5. Weeks 4–8. Watch. Fix. Keep paying the old provider.
6. Week 8. Send the cancellation, in writing, within the notice period the contract specifies.

That is roughly how we run it, and the step-by-step version lives on our switching page. For roofers in particular — where storm season makes going dark for a week genuinely expensive — the trade-specific version is on the page for roofers. And if you want to see the replacement before committing to any of it, we build your real homepage and send a private link before any payment, contract, sales call or credit card: the free homepage preview.

Sources

1. Hibu websites page — the product, with no price and no contract term published (read 2026-09-02) — https://www.hibu.com/websites
2. Scorpion partnerships page — the preferred-vendor arrangements with field-service software and trade associations (read 2026-09-02) — https://www.scorpion.co/about-us/partnerships/
3. Townsquare Interactive — the small-business digital arm of a local radio broadcaster (read 2026-09-02) — https://www.townsquareinteractive.com/
4. Radio Ink, February 2026 — Townsquare's sales restructuring, reported at roughly 40% lower headcount, with management stating a plan to rebuild (trade press, not a company filing) — https://radioink.com/2026/02/05/townsquare-media-pitches-hybrid-revenue-strategy-for-2026/
5. Radio Ink, March 2026 — follow-up on Townsquare's digital revenue outlook (trade press) — https://radioink.com/2026/03/17/townsquare-media-sees-digital-momentum-as-ai-cuts-web-traffic/
6. Green Cove Digital — a published ownership clause stating the design and code remain the vendor's — https://greencovedigital.com/
7. Dreamr — a published $4,800 buyout with paid fees credited only up to $3,500 — https://www.dreamr.store/
8. Clearwater Web Designs — a published twelve-month term with a clawback to the $3,800 standard price — https://clearwaterwebdesigns.com/
9. Repair Shop Websites — "all backend changes are required to be done on your end", published on their own site — https://www.repairshopwebsites.com/
10. ICANN Lookup — check who is actually listed as the registrant of your domain — https://lookup.icann.org/
11. Google Business Profile Help — managing owners and managers of your profile — https://support.google.com/business/
12. GablePath Digital — our own exit terms, published in full — https://gablepath.com/exit/

Every vendor page cited here was read on 2 September 2026 and may have changed since. Where a figure comes from someone other than the vendor, the sentence says so.