> I want to provide them with something that makes them independent from us, something they can just hire any random agency or freelancer to work on.
I have the same attitude and regularly find (sales) people not understanding why I'm doing this. They are pathologically looking for my angle. But there's none.
I totally have an angle, I consider our reputation to be our most important asset. There's a lot of devs and agencies out there. It's a whole lot harder to find good _and_ trustworthy ones. Being that is my angle. We got close to 100 % of our business from recommendations, and I like that. Wouldn't really want to spam strangers for finding gigs.
Of course, a lot of agencies do just that. And I've also seen more than one situation where an agency held their client hostage, not giving them access to their own code, hosting environment and what not.
Sure, it's not 100 % angle. It's also to a large degree professional ethics. But I can easily rationalise it into business value, and am probably not far off.
I have the same attitude and regularly find (sales) people not understanding why I'm doing this. They are pathologically looking for my angle. But there's none.