The Great Card Rescue Mission
A vendor lock-in story that ends with the customer winning.
The Problem
A laundromat was paying tens of thousands a year for a prepaid card system they wanted to leave. The catch? The vendor had no export, no migration path, and no interest in helping. Thousands of customer cards had real balances on them, and there was no way to move that data to a new system. The business was effectively locked in — switch vendors and lose every customer's balance, or keep paying a vendor they no longer wanted to work with.
The Fix
I cracked open the proprietary data structure, extracted every card number, balance, and transaction record from the old system, and built a secure, auditable transfer tool. Laundromat employees — with almost no training — could scan an old card, see the balance I'd recovered, and transfer it into the new system on the spot. The whole interface was designed to be fast and foolproof, so the customer experience at the counter was painless.
The Outcome
Every customer balance accounted for, every card migrated. What looked like a permanent vendor lock-in became a smooth transition. The business dropped a costly contract, customers never lost a dollar, and the employees picked up the new workflow in minutes. An impossible problem turned into an easy migration — because someone brought it to the right guy.
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