Plenty of companies discover, usually when they try to leave, that they don't own their own website. The domain is registered to the agency. The hosting sits on the agency's account. The site is built on a platform only that agency can edit. Changing supplier means starting again, and everyone involved knows it.
This is rarely malicious. It's often just convenient for the studio. But it leaves the client paying for a relationship they can't walk away from, and that's a poor basis for good work.
If you can't leave, you aren't a client. You're a subscriber.
What owning everything means
At the end of a project you should hold, in your own name and on your own accounts: the domain, the hosting, the email setup, the analytics, the source code, and every original file. That means the design files, the raw footage, the fonts licensed to you rather than to the studio. None of it should need the original studio to access.
Questions to ask before you sign
Whose name will the domain be registered in? Which account will the site be hosted on? Will we get the source code, and can another developer work on it? Who holds the licences for fonts, stock images and music? What happens to everything if we stop working together? A studio confident in its work answers these quickly and in writing.
Why a studio should want this
Handing everything over removes the one thing that keeps weaker suppliers in place: the cost of switching. What's left is the work and the relationship. If a client comes back, it's because they wanted to. That's the only kind of repeat business worth having, and the pressure it puts on the studio is healthy.
It also changes the conversation on day one. When a client knows they'll own everything, they can judge the proposal on its merits, not on fear of what happens if it goes wrong.
At handover, axium.media clients own everything — code, accounts, files and infrastructure. No lock-in, and one senior point of contact stays reachable.