Do you own your Base44 app? What the terms actually say

This is a plain-English reading of public documents, not legal advice. Terms change; the version discussed here is Base44’s terms of service dated 22 June 2026. If ownership matters to a deal or a dispute, ask a lawyer to read the current version with you.

What Base44 says in public

Base44’s pricing page answers the question directly: you own everything you build on Base44, your code, your data and your users, and two-way GitHub sync exports the full source code to your own repository. Its privacy and security documentation adds that ownership of an app belongs to the person who created it on the platform, and that you always retain ownership of your account and your apps.

That’s a clear promise, and in its own terms it’s true. The terms of service fill in what it means.

What the terms of service say

The terms of service deal with ownership in several places. Paraphrased, clause by clause:

The code and apps generated for you are yours. As between you and Base44, you own the rights in the code and applications the platform generates from your prompts and data, subject to Base44’s own intellectual property and “to the extent such rights exist under applicable law”. That last qualification matters because in many countries it’s unsettled whether machine-generated code attracts copyright at all.

Base44 doesn’t claim your data. Base44 won’t claim ownership of the data you and your users put into the platform, unless the generated output contains Base44’s own pre-existing intellectual property.

You give Base44 a broad license. You grant Base44 and its service providers an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free and sub-licensable license to use, copy, modify, distribute, publish and create derivative works of your data and of the generated output. The stated purpose is maintaining, providing and improving Base44’s platform and other services, and the terms list examples, including storing it with third-party cloud providers, backups and training Base44’s software tools, such as AI and machine-learning models.

Your content can appear in marketing. A separate clause lets Base44 use your data in its marketing and promotion, in perpetuity and free of charge, subject to its privacy policy.

Your access to the platform is revocable. The license you get to use Base44 is limited, non-transferable and fully revocable.

Output may not be unique. Base44 warns that other customers may generate output identical or similar to yours.

Access can end suddenly, and data may not survive it. Base44 may terminate or suspend your use of the platform immediately, without notice, for any reason, including a list of breaches. After a subscription ends, Base44 doesn’t guarantee continued access to your data and may delete your data and generated output at any time.

AI training depends on your plan

The terms permit training. Base44’s documentation says what happens in practice: on Enterprise, your workspace data isn’t used to train AI models, automatically; on every other plan, your data can be used to train AI models, and there is no opt-out setting. The Enterprise exclusion explicitly covers personal information people submit through your app’s forms, which implies that on other plans that information is in scope.

If your app collects personal data from your own users, that’s worth knowing, and worth mentioning in your privacy notice. Our article on GDPR and data residency covers the rest of that picture.

Ownership on paper, ownership in practice

Owning the rights to something and being able to use it without anyone’s permission are different things. A practical test of ownership has five questions:

1. Do you hold a copy of every part? Code, data, users, files, secrets and configuration.
2. Could you run it tomorrow if the platform disappeared or your account were suspended?
3. Can you decide where it runs and who processes its data?
4. Can you change anything in it, without asking?
5. Can you sell it or hand it over as a complete, working thing?

On Base44 the honest answers are:

None of this contradicts Base44’s promise. It shows that the promise covers the rights, not the independence.

Selling or handing over a Base44 app

Ownership becomes concrete when money changes hands. If you’re selling an app, or a company is acquiring yours, the buyer will ask what they are actually getting.

On Base44, a sale usually means moving the app into the buyer’s Base44 workspace, and the buyer inherits the same dependency: the platform, the plan and the terms. A buyer planning to run the app for years will often prefer a repository, a database and documentation they control, with no platform subscription attached. Moving the app onto infrastructure you own before the sale turns “an app on a platform” into a self-contained asset that is easier to value and to transfer.

Turning ownership into something practical

You don’t have to leave Base44 to protect yourself, but you do have to act:

• Keep copies of your code. Turn on GitHub sync, or download a ZIP after significant changes.
• Export your data regularly. Every important table, as CSV, stored somewhere that isn’t Base44.
• Document what can’t be exported. Secret names, connectors, automations, email settings and your domain’s DNS records.
• Know your exit path before you need it. The worst time to learn what an export doesn’t include is the week an account is suspended.

If you want the app itself under your control, Unbase44 moves it: the code into a private GitHub repo in your account, the records into your own database, the files into your own storage, and a documented Base44-compatible backend onto your own hosting. Users keep their passwords, and after the move nothing routes through Base44 or through us.

What moving does and doesn’t change

Moving your app changes what happens from then on. It doesn’t rewrite the past. The license in Base44’s terms is described as irrevocable and perpetual, and it covers the data and output you shared while you used the platform. After you move, new data from your users goes into your own database instead of Base44’s, and the terms that govern it are the ones you agree with your chosen providers.