What churnguardian does

There are two ways you lose recurring revenue. Sometimes a card fails and the customer never notices, which is involuntary churn. Other times the customer decides to leave, which is voluntary churn. churnguardian handles both:

• Failed payments. When a charge fails, we email the customer a branded reminder with a one-click card update link, and we retry the payment on a smart schedule.
• Cancellations. When a customer tries to cancel, a hosted flow captures the reason and offers a discount or a pause that is likely to keep them.
• Analytics. Every recovery and save shows up on your dashboard, so you can see what is working.

What you need

• A Stripe account that processes your subscriptions.
• About five minutes to connect and brand your first setup.
• A way to send cancel-flow links, either the entrance API or a manual link while you test.

You do not need to write any code to start. You only touch the API when you wire the cancel flow into your own cancel button.

Connect Stripe

churnguardian connects with a restricted, read-and-write API key that you create in Stripe. There is no OAuth screen and it works worldwide. The key is encrypted before we store it, and it only carries the billing permissions we need.

1. 1

   Open your Stripe API keys

   In Stripe go to Developers, then API keys, and click Create restricted key.

2. 2

   Enable the billing scopes

   Give the key access to customers, setup intents, payment methods, coupons, the customer portal, invoices, subscriptions, and read access to accounts. Nothing about payouts or funds is needed.

3. 3

   Paste the keys into onboarding

   Back in churnguardian, paste the restricted secret key and your publishable key. We check the key against Stripe before saving it.

Brand the emails

Recovery emails read like they come from you, not from a third-party tool. In settings you set four things, and the live preview shows the result before you send anything:

• Merchant name. The name customers see, usually your product or company.
• Brand color. Used on the email header and the update button.
• Logo. Optional. Leave it blank and we use your initials instead.
• Sender and reply-to. The address your customers see and where their replies land.

Head to Settings → Recovery Campaign to set these. The tabbed preview shows each email in the three-message sequence.

Turn on your cancel flows

A cancel flow is a hosted page that catches a customer before they leave. It asks why they are going, then shows the offer most likely to keep them. You set the discount range and strategy once, and the offers adapt from there.

1. Open Settings → Cancel Flows and set your discount range, duration, and exploration strategy.
2. Generate an entrance key. This authenticates your server when it asks for a cancel-flow link.
3. Call the entrance API at cancel time with the customer and subscription, then redirect the browser to the URL it returns.

The entrance API is a single request. Full details, including the response and every status, are in the cancel flow setup guide and the API reference.

Watch it work

Once Stripe is connected and a payment fails or a customer cancels, data starts flowing in. Three places are worth checking:

• Recovery Dashboard. Recovery rate, recovered MRR, churn split, cohort retention, churn reasons, and the offers people take.
• Recovery Analytics. Payment volume by outcome, decline reasons, and which recovery method actually recovers money.
• Cancel Flows. Save rate versus the control group, the offer heatmap, and recent sessions.

To understand the charts, read Reading your dashboard.

Where to go next

• Core concepts to learn the vocabulary behind churn, dunning, and offers.
• Cancel flow setup guide for the full integration walkthrough.
• API reference for the entrance endpoint, request, and response.
• Data and security for exactly what we read, store, and how to revoke access.