SaaS founders - how do you handle cancellations?
I'm currently building a tiny tool to reduce churn for SaaS products using Stripe, something super simple:
But before I go too far, I’m genuinely curious...
How do YOU handle cancellations right now?
Do you ask why they leave to improve your product?
Do you offer a discount? A pause?
Or just let them go?
Also:
Have you ever tested different approaches?
What’s one thing that actually worked for you to keep a user from leaving?
Would love to hear how you deal with it — I'm building this in public, and all feedback is gold
Drop your stories / tactics / fails — let’s help each other keep our users around
Replies
@lee_pri Thanks for the support!
We start by asking why the user wants to cancel. Based on their response, we show the most relevant offer pause, discount, or something else. If they accept, it’s applied instantly via Stripe. Then you can review all this in a dashboard to understand churn trends and product pain points.
Hi @toreapat ! Really interested to hear more about what you're building — sounds like it could be super helpful for early-stage SaaS tools especially.
Personally, I try to guide users through the cancellation process rather than just letting them go silently. I always ask why they’re leaving and use that moment to collect as much honest feedback as possible. If cancellations spike, I take it as a clear sign something needs to improve — that feedback becomes gold for refining the product.
Curious to see what direction you take this in!
@natalia_eiriz Thanks! Totally agree. That moment is full of insight, and it’s great that you already use it to collect feedback.
You mentioned guiding users through the cancellation. Curious how you do that today? Is it a custom flow, a survey, or more of a personal follow-up? Always interesting to see how early-stage teams approach this, especially before automating things.
@toreapat Thanks for the question! 😊 When I know a user wants to cancel, they receive an email with clear, step-by-step instructions on how to proceed. Even though it’s a cancellation, I make sure the process is as hassle-free as everything else.
In return, I always ask for feedback to understand the reason behind their decision and learn how we can improve — it’s a great opportunity to gather valuable insights!
Always happy to share how we handle it, and excited to learn about other approaches too! What do you believe it is one of the main priorities to take into account when someone wants to cancel?
I usually treat cancellations as feedback. Every time someone leaves I try to understand why and if it's something I can fix or improve.
@new_user___11420254f2d5d82ddc8219c
How do you usually collect that feedback when someone cancels?
Do you ask them directly in-app, send a follow-up email, or something else?
Always looking to learn from how other founders approach this!
Lancepilot
Great initiative. 👏 Wishing you the best as you build this tackling churn is such an important and tricky part of SaaS growth. Hope you get tons of valuable insights from the community.
@priyankamandal Tackling churn definitely feels like solving a moving puzzle, but I'm excited to help SaaS founders keep more of their hard-earned customers.
Appreciate the support! Can’t wait to learn from the community and keep improving!
Hey @toreapat ! Very interesting topic!
When users cancel, we always ask for feedback with a short exit survey. It helps us understand if it's a pricing issue, missing feature, or timing. We also offer the option to pause the account instead of canceling, which works well for seasonal users.
Tried offering discounts, but it rarely changed minds. What really helped was adding more clarity around the value they're getting before they even consider canceling (like usage summaries and feature highlights).
Curious to see what you’re building! Keeping it simple sounds promising 🚀
@hugo_pochet Really helpful perspective!
Interesting to hear that discounts didn’t have much impact. I’m exploring ways to offer more targeted responses depending on why users cancel.
Thanks for the support!
Hi @toreapat when we were building KaleHQ, we started with the premise of building a cancellation management solution similar to raaft.io, brightback (acquired by chargebee). In the process we spoke with many GTM and marketing teams to understand their process of cancellation and churn.
Most of the time they were using a combination of some capabilities provided by subscription management tools and integrated it with form from google forms or typeform or in some cases it was built part of the product workflow itself.
This was hardcoded like this - customer clicks cancellation button -> form -> discount coupon / freebie based on response
During the conversations we felt that churn is more an engagement problem, hence we pivoted to build for engagement than directly addressing churn
Hope this helps
@x_genie
Appreciate you sharing!
That cancel → form → incentive flow makes sense.
When you say churn felt more like an engagement problem, wwhat kind of signals or tactics made you shift in that direction?
OMG please no one say "just let them go"! It's overwelmingly more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing!