A common pattern in agency work is for the studio to hold the keys. The repository lives in the studio's GitHub organisation, the app is deployed from the studio's cloud account, and the domain was registered by whoever happened to be setting things up. Everything works until the relationship ends, and then a client discovers that leaving means a migration.
We do the opposite. Before any code is written, we ask the client to create the GitHub organisation, the cloud account, the Apple and Google developer accounts and the DNS zone in the company's own name. We are added as members. Billing goes to the client's card.
What it costs us
Leverage. A client who owns everything can walk away at the end of any sprint with no friction. That is the point. We would rather be kept because the work is good than because leaving is painful.
It also costs a little time at the start. Setting up accounts in someone else's name means a checklist, a short call, and sometimes a wait for a finance team to approve a card. We have found this takes two or three days and it is worth every one of them.
What it costs the client
Almost nothing, and the cloud bill arrives on the right statement from month one, which finance teams prefer anyway. The one real obligation is that someone at the client holds the owner role and keeps their own access secure. We help set up two-factor authentication and a break-glass account as part of the checklist.
The handover that never needs to happen
Because nothing was ever in our name, the end of an engagement is a matter of removing a few members from a few organisations. The runbook, the CI configuration and the environment variables are already where the client's next engineer will look for them. That is what we mean when we say that if we disappeared tomorrow, you would lose nothing but our company.