EU Data Act Switching clauses — check cloud switching clauses in your

EUR 2,500 to leave, plus EUR 0.09 per GB to take your data out - EU SaaS vendors, platform engineers and in-house counsel: that is the exit clause sitting in your repository, and this is what the checker prints over it.

L5   error  Art. 25(2)  Notice period of 90 days to start switching.
L9   error  Art. 25(2)  Transitional period of 6 months.
L11  error  Art. 29     Egress charge named in an exit clause.
L15  error  Art. 25(2)  Retrieval window of 14 days.
L16  error  Art. 25(2)  Data erased at termination.
L17  error  Art. 30     Export offered only in a proprietary format.

Six lines, six errors, one file: _fixtures/dirty.md, the sample contract bundled with the extension. Run every rule over that file and it returns 21 findings - 14 errors and 7 warnings - from all 20 rules. The corrected version, also bundled, returns 0.

The date behind those lines is 12 September 2025, when Chapter VI of Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 - the Data Act - started to apply to data processing services. A customer may switch to another provider or move to their own on-premises infrastructure. The notice period to start that switch is capped at two months. The mandatory maximum transitional period is 30 calendar days. Exportable data and digital assets come back in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Erasure happens after a retrieval period of at least 30 days, not on the termination date. And the price of leaving falls to nothing: reduced, cost-based charges during the transition window, then zero from 12 January 2027.

Now open the terms file in your own repository - the one written from a 2023 template, or re-drafted by a model trained on templates like it. It says a notice period of 90 days, where the cap is two months. It says a transition period of six months, where the maximum is 30 days. It gives the customer 14 days to download their data and deletes everything immediately afterwards, where the minimum retrieval window is 30 days. It charges a switching fee of EUR 2,500 and bills bulk extraction at EUR 0.09 per GB. It exports in a proprietary format with no published schema. And in the regulatory paragraph, it says the Data Act applies from January 2024 - the entry into force, not the date of application.

Seven of the 20 rules look for absences rather than bad wording, and absences are what a reader misses most reliably. No clause granting the right to switch. No promise of a machine-readable export format. No assistance clause. No published jurisdictions for the infrastructure that stores customer data. No register of the data structures and formats a customer can export. No mention of functional equivalence for infrastructure services. No point of contact for a switching request. You cannot spot a missing paragraph by reading it; you spot it by checking a list.

One rule knows what day it is. Run the charge rule now and it reports that switching charges must be zero from 12 January 2027 - 121 days from 13 September 2026. Run the same text after that date and the warning becomes an error, because the transition window has closed. Same file, same rule, different answer, because the calendar moved.

This is also the specific place where a general-purpose model is unreliable. Ask one about the Data Act and it will often tell you it applied in 2024. The checks here are 20 fixed rules, cited to Art. 23, 25, 26, 29 and 30, run over the actual files.

Free finishes one file: open a contract, run the check, read every finding with its line and its article. The paid tier is a different axis - scope and a keepsake. One sweep over every contract file in the workspace, and a dated report with a per-file table that you own and hand to counsel. An EU technology lawyer reviewing the exit clauses of one cloud contract bills at EUR 250-450 per hour; the point of the report is that the hour is spent on wording, not on finding the clauses.