Today I relearned a lesson that marketers would call “canonical,” but it came to me through a much smaller, more personal example:

never trust someone else with your data.

Here’s what happened: I used SendGrid (Twilio’s email service) to store my mailing list. Nothing fancy — maybe 100, 200 emails from shows. I don’t send newsletters often, but I liked knowing the list was there.

And then… it wasn’t.

SendGrid quietly changed their “free forever” plan into a “60-day trial.” Because I hadn’t logged in for a while (who checks these things?), my account got locked. Not just locked from sending emails. Locked from seeing my own list at all.

Poof. Gone.

I thought, okay, no big deal, I’ll just pay for the $20 plan. Nope. My account was “under review.” No way to upgrade. So I entered support ticket hell.

The replies were all the same: “You need to upgrade your plan.”
I wrote back: “That’s the problem, I can’t.”
They wrote again: “You need to upgrade your plan.”

Around and around. Generic answers, zero accountability.

And here’s the hard truth: I had no real recourse. Am I going to hire a lawyer over a couple hundred emails? No. To them, I’m a tiny fish. Screaming into the void.

The deeper lesson is this: if it matters to you, don’t leave it in someone else’s hands. Corporations can change their terms overnight. They send an email you miss, and suddenly you’ve “agreed.” Their systems are built to prioritize their incentives, not yours.

Your data — your work, your list, your people — is too valuable to trust to someone else’s whims. Back it up. Store it yourself. Own it.

Otherwise, one day you’ll log in and find the gate locked, your stuff sitting behind it, and no one willing to hand you the key.