You are paying every month for a tour you cannot move
There are three possible answers to “can I take my tour with me”, and you can find out which one you have this week without telling your supplier why you are asking. Either you can download files that run on their own, or you can download something that needs their software running on a server, or you cannot download anything at all and what you have is an embed code. The third is the most common. The second is the one people mistake for the first. Only the first survives cancelling.
Find out which one you have
Find the export, and run it
Not “is there an export”. Export it now. A feature you have never used is a description in a marketing table, and the moment to discover it produces a link rather than a file is not the month you are leaving.
Open what came out with the network off
Airplane mode, then open the entry file. If the tour runs, you hold a tour. If you get a spinner, an error or a blank frame, part of it is being fetched from somewhere and that somewhere is a party to your tour.
Look at what your own website embeds
View the page source and find the iframe. If it points at a domain that is not yours, the tour is not on your site — a window on your site is showing a tour on theirs, and deleting the account empties the window.
Ask, in writing, what you keep
One sentence: if I stop paying today, what do I still have, and in what format? Keep the reply. It is the only part of this that a salesperson cannot re-describe to you later.
The five things people call an export
- An embed code
- A snippet that puts their player on your page. Portable in the sense that you can paste it anywhere; portable in no other sense. Close the account and every page carrying it shows an empty frame — including the ones you have forgotten about.
- A link
- A URL on their domain. This is not an export at all, and it is worth saying so plainly, because it is frequently offered as one.
- A package that needs a runtime
- Real files, and a real improvement on the first two. But it has to be executed rather than served. The one guide we found anywhere in this field that explains self-hosting properly lists index.php and db.php among the exported files and requires shared hosting or a VPS running PHP 7.4 or higher. That is a folder you hold. It is not a folder that runs anywhere.
- Static files
- Panoramas, tiles, an entry HTML file, JavaScript. Serve them from any host, or open them from a disk with nothing running at all. This is the only version that survives both your supplier and your web host, and it is what we hand over.
- The panoramas on their own
- Sometimes all that is available, and worth having regardless. If you can get the original equirectangular images at full resolution, a replacement is a build job. If all you can pull is what the player streams to a browser, that is display-resolution output of a master you do not hold.
The one question that decides most of the cost
Ask your supplier for the original panoramas at full resolution. Not the tour, not the export, not the tiles — the source images. If they exist and you can have them, take them and keep them, whatever you decide about the tour itself. They are the expensive part. The building was as it was on the day, the light was what it was, the rooms were dressed the way somebody had dressed them, and none of that can be re-derived from anything. The build can be redone. The photographs cannot.
What a rebuild actually involves
- Count the positions in the tour you already have. That is your station count, and it is the one number a quote turns on. You do not need us to count it and you should not need permission to.
- Decide what comes across besides the pictures: room names, information popups, routes, an extra language. That layer is usually what took the longest to build, it is not inside the panoramas, and it is the part most people forget to price.
- Assume a new capture unless somebody hands you the full-resolution masters. Ask first — the answer is occasionally yes, and it changes the job completely.
- Price the capture from the published rates: €40 for each of the first ten photographs, €30 for each one after, a €160 minimum, VAT on top. Extras are separate and listed — audio at €30 a file, an extra language at €100, floor-plan positioning at €5 per panorama, and the rest on the pricing page.
- Subtract nothing for what you already paid. That money is spent either way, and letting it argue for staying is the sunk cost doing your thinking for you. The only live question is whether the next one is yours.
What changes, in the terms that matter
| Question | Renting | Holding the files |
|---|---|---|
| What happens if you stop paying | The tour comes down | Nothing. There is nothing to stop paying. |
| Where the tour is served from | Their infrastructure | Anywhere you can put a folder |
| Who can move it | Whoever holds the account | Whoever holds the folder |
| What a website rebuild costs you | Re-embedding, and finding the login first | Copying a directory |
| What you can put in a procurement file | A licence to view | The thing itself |
| What a new web agency inherits | An account they have to be given | A folder in the repository |
If you want to know what the replacement would look like before deciding anything, send the address and roughly which spaces matter and we will come back with a station count and a fixed price. If you want to check the deliverable before you talk to anybody, what arrives on the last day lists what is in the folder, and every tour we have published is open in a browser with no form in front of it.
Sources, and when we last checked them
- Lapentor, “How to Run a Self-Hosted Virtual Tour from Lapentor”, published 24 September 2025 Checked August 2026 The one published guide we located that explains self-hosting concretely. Lists index.php and db.php among the exported files and requires PHP 7.4 or higher on the host.
Questions people ask
- Can you convert my existing tour instead of reshooting it?
- Only if you hold the original panoramas at full resolution. With those, a new tour is a build job on images you already own. Without them, the material available is whatever the old player streams to a browser, which is display-resolution output of a master somebody else holds — so the honest answer is a new capture. Ask your current supplier for the source images before you ask anyone for a quote.
- How do I count my own stations?
- Open the tour and count the distinct positions you can stand in — every point where the view jumps to a new place rather than turning on the spot. That total is the station count. Our rates apply to it directly: €40 for each of the first ten, €30 for each one after, €160 minimum.
- Is it worth telling my current supplier I am leaving?
- Not until you have run the export and taken a copy of everything you can get. Ask the factual questions first — what do I keep, in what format, and can I have the source panoramas — because those answers are easier to obtain from a supplier who thinks they are keeping you.
- What if the tour is embedded on pages I no longer control?
- That is a good reason to act, and a common one. Anything a third party embedded — a portal listing, a partner site, a printed QR code — points at a URL you do not own. A tour you host yourself keeps that URL under your control, so the same link survives a change of supplier.
