You should be able to fire us: the portable employee bundle

Every vendor says you own your data. The test is not the sentence in the terms of service; it is what the export button actually produces, and whether the file is useful anywhere else. For an AI employee, 'your data' has an unusual shape. It is not rows in a CRM. It is a trained-up teammate: months of corrections, a tuned set of instructions, the accumulated judgment of your team encoded as memories. If that cannot leave, you did not hire an employee. You leased a dependency.

So a Pagerox employee exports as a bundle: a documented, versioned format (pagerox.employee.bundle/v1) you can download, read in a text editor, diff, and take with you.

Three things go in. The role config: the employee's instructions and guardrails as structured, human-readable fields, with the config version, not an opaque blob. The memory ledger: every active memory with its content, the role of whoever taught it, its weight, and when it was learned. And the golden questions: the eval set that defines what 'working' means for this employee, so wherever the bundle lands, you can verify the employee still passes its own bar.

Now the part we consider just as load-bearing: what never exports. Credentials never export. Not API keys, not tool connections, not tokens, not under a flag, not through a support escalation. Connecting a tool is a human act performed in the destination workspace, every time. A bundle that carried credentials would be a breach kit with a friendly filename, and the fact that it would also be convenient does not change that. Raw Slack content does not export either, for the simplest possible reason: we do not have it. Process-and-drop means there is no message archive to include.

Import is deliberately undramatic. A bundle lands as a draft in the employee builder, never as a live hire. Nothing connects, nothing listens, nothing acts until a human reviews the draft and explicitly hires it. This also closes an unglamorous attack path: a malicious or tampered bundle cannot walk into a workspace and start operating, because the file format simply has no way to express 'and now run.'

One import detail we want to be upfront about, because it is a deliberate loss of information. Imported memories are re-attributed to the admin who imported them. Our ledger promises that 'taught by this person on this date' is a claim you can act on, and we cannot honestly assert that about people from a workspace we cannot verify. So the import says what is actually true: this admin vouched for these memories, on this date. Provenance you can trust beats provenance that flatters the data.

Leaving entirely works the same way. Workspace offboarding is a full export (knowledge, decision log, audit log, configurations, in portable JSON and Markdown) plus verified deletion within 30 days. We wrote that into the spec before we wrote the billing page, which is the right order to decide these things in.

The honest reason for all of this is incentive design, pointed at us. A vendor whose customers cannot leave gets slow, and then it gets smug. We price an employee like a salary, and a salary only makes sense if firing is possible. The bundle keeps the relationship legible: if you can walk out with everything your team taught, the only reason to stay is that the work is good this month. That is the deal human employees offer. We do not see why we should get a better one.