Deciding to leave is the hard part. Most owners get there after a renewal, a price change, or one workaround too many, and once the decision is made the instinct is to cancel that afternoon and feel lighter about it.
That is the one move worth not making yet. Cancelling belongs at the end of the list, and the reason is a single sentence in Skimmer's own help centre, which tells departing customers their data stays in the system for a while but that Skimmer "cannot guarantee how long that data will remain in the system after cancellation". No number, no window. Whatever you have not pulled out by the time you stop paying is on an unknown clock.
The asymmetry catches people out. Skimmer's FAQ puts cancellation behind two clicks — on the website, Account, then Payment Method — and that is genuinely all it takes. There is no retention call, no 30-day notice period to serve, no contract to run down. Skimmer's pricing page says in as many words that there are "no setup fees, no contracts".
Everything that makes leaving slow sits on your side of the line. You have a customer list that has been edited for years, a service history that is the only record of what was done at which pool, open invoices in various states of paid, and a set of customers whose card details live in a payment vault you do not control. None of that moves because you clicked cancel. Some of it moves because you exported it first.
Start from the vendor's own words rather than from a forum post. Skimmer's help centre FAQ, read on 27 October 2026, says plainly that "Skimmer allows you to export customer information and service history", with the export options sitting under the Settings menu on the website. Elsewhere in the same FAQ, in the context of moving customers to another company, it says you can export "the basic customer list to a spreadsheet".
That covers the two things that matter most. What the FAQ does not spell out is everything else — properties as records in their own right, contact details separate from the customer, your recurring schedule structure, or your billing ledger. The honest position is that those are not stated, so treat them as something to check inside your own account before you rely on them.
| Record | Can you export it from Skimmer? | Does a free Pool Runs migration bring it? |
|---|---|---|
| Customer list | Yes — "basic customer list to a spreadsheet" | Yes — customers |
| Properties | Not stated separately | Yes — properties |
| Contacts | Not stated separately | Yes — contacts |
| Service history | Yes — "customer information and service history" | Not on the published list |
| Recurring schedules | Not stated | Yes — "set up your recurring schedules with you" |
| Saved payment methods | Not stated | Not on the published list |
| Open invoices and balances | Not stated | Not on the published list |
Customer list
Properties
Contacts
Service history
Recurring schedules
Saved payment methods
Open invoices and balances
Skimmer column: help.getskimmer.com FAQ, read 2026-10-27. Pool Runs column: poolruns.com/pricing, read 2026-10-27 — "Migration is free. We bring over your customers, properties and contacts from the software you use now, and set up your recurring schedules with you." "Not stated" means the vendor's own page does not say, not that it is impossible — check inside your account.
Read that table as a work list rather than a verdict. The left column is what you can get out. The right column is what somebody else will carry in for you. The rows where both columns stop short are the rows that become your job, and there are only two of them that really hurt.
The sentence that sets your timeline
Skimmer's FAQ says data remains for a time after cancellation but that it "cannot guarantee how long that data will remain in the system after cancellation". There is no published retention window to plan against. Finish every export while the subscription is still active and you still have a login.
The sequence below is the whole argument of this piece. Each step exists because doing it later than this costs you something you cannot get back.
Cancelling is step five, not step one. Steps one to four all need a working login to the system you are leaving.
The one step owners reliably underestimate is the third. More on that below, because it is the step that decides whether your first month on a new system collects money on time or does not.
Treat this as a download session with a folder on your own machine at the end of it. Not a cloud link into the old system — files you hold. Give yourself an afternoon.
The export checklist
0 / 6Both ends of this are month to month, which is the single most useful fact about the economics. Skimmer's pricing page, read on 27 October 2026, states no setup fees and no contracts, and prices its Getting Started plan from $49 a month including 49 serviced locations, with locations past that at $1.00 each per month, and its Scaling Up plan from $98 a month, also including 49 locations, with locations past that at $2.00 each. Technicians and admins are unlimited on both. Pool Runs, on its own pricing page read the same day, is $45 a month including 50 properties, with each property past 50 at $1.75 and counted only in a month you actually service it, users and technicians unlimited at no charge, month to month, cancel anytime.
So the cost of overlapping the two for a few weeks is one extra monthly bill, and that is the cheapest insurance available on a migration. You keep a working login to the old system — which is what every step above depends on — while the new one takes over the live route. Nobody has to get the cutover perfect on the first Monday.
One trial clause worth reading twice
Skimmer's pricing page offers its Scaling Up plan free for one month, and adds that "unless cancelled, any usage beyond 49 locations during the trial will be billed in arrears after the trial period ends". If you are a company with more than 49 locations, a free month is not free. Read the same clause on whatever you are moving to — Pool Runs publishes a 30-day free trial on the core plan with no equivalent arrears clause. Both read 2026-10-27.
Both platforms bill a base plus a per-location charge, so the headline number tells you almost nothing until you put your own pool count through it. Skimmer sorts you into a plan by monthly pool count — Getting Started for nought to 49, Scaling Up for 50 to 1,000 — and both of those plans include 49 serviced locations before the per-location charge starts. The practical effect is that crossing 50 pools moves you onto the $98 base and doubles your per-location rate to $2.00 at the same time.
| Pools serviced in the month | Skimmer | Pool Runs |
|---|---|---|
| 45 | $49 — Getting Started, all 45 within the 49 included | $45 — all 45 within the 50 included |
| 80 | $160 — Scaling Up $98 + 31 x $2.00 | $97.50 — $45 + 30 x $1.75 |
| 150 | $300 — Scaling Up $98 + 101 x $2.00 | $228.75 — $45 + 105 x $1.75 |
| Technicians and office users | Unlimited, no charge | Unlimited, no charge |
| Service texts | $0.029 each on Getting Started; unlimited included on Scaling Up | In the $50 Communications add-on: 1,000 a month, then 3c each |
| AI phone answering | AI Phone add-on, $99 a month | In the $50 Communications add-on: 400 voice minutes, then $0.15 a minute |
45
80
150
Technicians and office users
Service texts
AI phone answering
Base and per-location rates read on getskimmer.com/pricing and poolruns.com/pricing, both 2026-10-27; the row totals are arithmetic on those published rates. Skimmer's plan bands are by monthly pool count, and both its plans include 49 serviced locations. Where Skimmer is better value is worth saying plainly: unlimited service texts are included in its Scaling Up plan, where the equivalent at Pool Runs sits inside a paid add-on.
Two warnings about reading any table like that one, including this one. First, the add-on rows are not like for like — a $99 monthly AI phone product and 400 pooled voice minutes inside a $50 bundle are different things, and which is cheaper depends entirely on your call volume. Second, the per-month software bill is rarely the biggest number in this decision anyway. What you pay to take a card payment moves more money than the subscription does, on most routes, and it is the figure owners check last.
The point of running the numbers before you cancel rather than after is simple: if price is the reason you are leaving, you want to know that the saving is real on your pool count and not just on the homepage. If it turns out to be small, the service history and the payment re-authorisation work may not be worth it this season.
Everything in this piece so far is logistics. These two are different in kind, because no vendor on either side can fix them for you.
When a customer puts a card on file, the card number is not what gets stored. What gets stored is a token that only means something to the payment processor holding it, tied to that merchant account. Move to a different platform and the token is worthless, which is why no migration anywhere in this industry carries saved payment methods across. It is not a limitation of one vendor's importer. It is how card storage works.
So budget for a re-authorisation push rather than a transfer. Every customer on autopay has to enter their details once in the new system, and the percentage who do it promptly decides whether your first month collects on time. Our guide to getting customers onto automatic payment is written for exactly this moment — run it as a campaign, in the weeks before the switch, not as an afterthought in the week after.
The second one is softer and bites harder. Your technicians have muscle memory for one app. For two or three weeks they will be slower, they will miss a field they always used to fill, and somebody will close out a stop wrong. That is normal and it passes. What makes it worse is cutting over in your busiest month, which is the argument for doing this between seasons.
Export and cancel at once, or run both for a month?
Cancel straight away
Overlap for a month
For a company of any size, the overlap is worth the extra bill. The only case for cancelling immediately is a very small route where you can hold the whole customer list in your head anyway.
Monday: export and keep the files
Work down the checklist above while the old subscription is live. Save everything into one dated folder. Do not start loading the new system until the folder is complete — you want one clean snapshot, not a moving target.
Tuesday: load customers, properties and routes
If your new vendor does assisted migration, this is their day rather than yours. Your job is to check the result against the old system on screen, account by account for the biggest twenty, spot-checked for the rest.
Wednesday: rebuild the schedule and check a day
Pull up next Tuesday's route in both systems side by side. Same properties, same order, same technician. Any difference here becomes a missed stop later.
Thursday: send the payment re-authorisation
One clear message to every autopay customer, explaining that you have changed systems and their card needs entering once. Expect to chase. Start before the cutover, not after it.
Friday: close out billing, then cancel
Issue final invoices from the old system, record open balances in the new one, and only then cancel. Skimmer's FAQ puts that behind Account, then Payment Method on the website.
Less than you think. Customers do not care which software you use; they care that the invoice looks right, the visit still happens on Tuesday, and nobody asks them to do paperwork. The only message worth sending is the payment one, and it works best framed as a single small favour with a deadline rather than as an announcement about a migration.
One thing worth doing deliberately: tell your crew to keep writing notes at the same level of detail from day one on the new system. A migration is the most common point at which a company's service history quietly gets thinner, because everyone is busy and the new fields are in different places.
Price is the easiest reason to check and the least common real one. In practice owners move for three other reasons, and each has a specific thing worth testing during a trial rather than discovering in February.
The first is a missing capability that is always about to arrive. Software roadmaps are not promises, and the honest test is whether the thing you need exists today, in the trial account, doing the job on your own data. If a salesperson describes it in the future tense, treat it as absent. Load twenty of your own properties and try to do the task end to end.
The second is support. This is the hardest thing to evaluate from the outside and the easiest to test cheaply: send a genuinely awkward question during your trial, on a weekday afternoon in season, and time the reply. Not a pre-sales question — a messy one about your own data. How a company answers that while you are still a trial is a reasonable indication of how it answers when you are a paying customer in a hurry.
The third is a billing model that fights your business. If you close pools for part of the year, what you want to know is whether you are charged for a property in a month when nobody serviced it. Both platforms discussed here bill on serviced locations per month rather than on your whole book, which is worth confirming on the pricing page for whatever you move to — and worth confirming for yourself inside the trial, by looking at what the first invoice actually counted.
The reason to do this before you cancel rather than after is that moving twice costs you the service history twice. Each migration is another point where notes get thinner and another re-authorisation push at your customers. Owners will tolerate one of those. The second one damages the thing you were trying to protect.
This piece is deliberately narrow: the data and the cancellation, for one platform. If you are still deciding whether to move at all, what a migration moves and when in the season to do it is the broader argument, and our side-by-side comparison with Skimmer sets out the pricing and feature differences with sources and dates on every figure.
If you want the migration handled rather than managed, Pool Runs does it free: customers, properties and contacts brought over from whatever you use now, with your recurring schedules set up alongside you. The terms, the 30-day trial and what each property costs are all on our pricing page. Export your records either way.
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