What are Cancel Flows?

Cancel Flows is our featured offer for keeping customers who are trying to cancel. When someone cancels inside your app, you send them to a page we host for you. That page shows their plan, offers them a discount to stay, and if they still want to leave, collects a reason and schedules the cancellation. Every step shows up in your Cancel Flows dashboard.

Two pieces work together:

• The entrance. A small API your own backend calls at cancel time to get the link for that customer.
• The smart offer picker. We learn which discount your customers actually accept, per plan, and stay safely inside the guardrails you set.

How it works

1. A customer clicks “cancel” in your app. Your server calls our entrance endpoint with their Stripe customerId and subscriptionId.
2. We create a session, pick a sensible offer for that plan, and hand back a hosted link like https://churnguardian.com/cancel/[token].
3. You send the customer to that link. No login, nothing to set up on their side.
4. They see their plan and an offer, for example “20% off for 3 months”. They can apply it or continue canceling.
5. If they accept, we apply a discount to that subscription and note how much revenue you kept. If they decline, we record their reason and, if they insist, schedule the cancellation for the end of the billing period.
6. Results appear in your dashboard as they happen: acceptance rates, saved revenue, and how each plan is doing.

How offers are chosen

Rather than showing every customer the same discount, we learn which offers your customers accept and quietly favor those over time. It all happens inside the limits you set, so we can never suggest something you would not be comfortable approving.

A few things worth knowing:

• Start safe. When a plan has little data yet, we offer the middle of what you allow. Not the deepest, not the cheapest. Predictable, and a fair place to begin.
• Get smarter. As customers respond, we steer toward offers that are accepted more often. You can watch this in the Offer Performance heatmap.
• Respect billing cycles. Annual plans only ever get 12-month offers. Quarterly and other multi-month plans only get offers that match their billing cycle, unless you turn those rules off.

You can also turn adaptive offers off at any time. Every plan then simply receives the single base offer you choose. We keep recording results either way, so you can compare before switching back.

What you configure

Everything lives on the Cancel Flows settings tab. The defaults shown in parentheses are safe to run as-is.

Strategy choices at a glance:Conservative plays it safe and keeps offers consistent. Balanced, the default, learns reliably without surprises. Aggressive learns as fast as possible, handy for lower-volume plans.

Discounts are capped between 5% and 95%, and durations between 1 and 12 months. Changes apply to new sessions right away.

Reading your dashboard

The dashboard compares your results with adaptive offers on and off. A small, stable share of your customers always receives your fixed offer instead of an adaptive one; the rest are served adaptive offers. This group is your control, and it keeps the comparison honest over time.

Save Rate is how often a customer accepts an offer and is still subscribed roughly a month later. A discount that looks good on paper only counts once it actually keeps the customer around. Value Boost is how much better the adaptive results are than the fixed offer.

We run a statistical check before calling any difference meaningful. Until there is enough data to trust the numbers, they are shown with a "no significant difference yet" note, so early days don't mislead you.

Entrance API

Your backend calls this the moment a customer tries to cancel. It is protected by your entrance key, which you can see on the settings tab. The key is shown once when created, and you can rotate it any time.

POST

Asks for a hosted link for a particular customer and subscription.

curl -X POST https://churnguardian.com/api/cancel-flow/entrance \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ENTRANCE_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"customerId":"cus_...","subscriptionId":"sub_..."}'

{
  "ok": true,
  "url": "https://churnguardian.com/cancel/[token]",
  "combo": { "discountPct": 20, "durationMonths": 3 }
}

Redirect the customer's browser to url. The combo field tells you which offer was chosen for this session, which can be handy for your own logging.

GET

If a POST is awkward for your stack, the same call works as a GET and replies with a 307 redirect straight to the hosted page.

curl -i "https://churnguardian.com/api/cancel-flow/entrance?customerId=cus_...&subscriptionId=sub_..." \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ENTRANCE_KEY"

Likely errors

What customers see

Each link is tied to one subscription and works once. The page at https://churnguardian.com/cancel/[token] shows:

• The plan and price they were about to cancel.
• An offer, for example “Keep your plan, 20% off for 3 months”.
• A short question about why they are leaving, and clear choices to apply the offer or continue canceling.

If the customer accepts, we apply a discount to that subscription only, so other subscriptions on the same account are never affected. If they choose to cancel, we schedule it for the end of the current billing period. Visiting a finished link again never applies anything twice.

Session statuses

Trying it out

1. Make sure your connected Stripe account has some test customers and subscriptions, for example a couple of different plans.
2. Call the entrance API (above) with one of those cus_… and sub_… pairs.
3. Walk the flow yourself: accept an offer once and cancel once. Then check Stripe to confirm the discount (or the scheduled cancellation) and watch the dashboard update.

Questions people ask