Bring the site, the list and the domain.

Download your subscribers from wherever they live now and bring the file. Anyone with a clear record of having said yes goes straight in. Anyone without one — an old list, a date nobody wrote down — is held back, and no message goes to them until you have asked once and they have said yes. That is slower than a platform that mails everybody regardless, and it is the difference between a list and a liability.

A Goose site is not a copy of a page. It is the facts the page is built from: your dates, your rooms, your season, your prices. Nothing can read those reliably out of somebody else's web page, so they get typed in — by you, or by us. For most sites that is an afternoon, and it is worth an afternoon because it is the last time anybody edits the site by hand.

This is the step that worries people, so it is the one to be plainest about. It is not one click. You point the domain at Cloudflare yourself, which keeps you in control of your own registration, and then a person here attaches it and switches it on. Nothing about your site goes dark while that happens, because it is already live at its Goose address and keeps working throughout.

The honest test of a platform is what happens when you want to leave. Your subscribers, your orders and your content download as spreadsheets — or the whole site as one file — on every plan including the free one, before you have paid us anything. A site can also change hands with its audience attached, and deleting one erases it, after we have offered you the download first.