Comparison
A Churnkey alternative that saves the cancel and shows you why people leave
Save the cancel, ask why, read the answer. When a subscriber clicks cancel, AcornRetain asks the question you wrote, offers the discount you tied to their answer, and applies it to their Stripe subscription for you if they take it. Every answer is kept for you to read. Churnkey does this inside a larger retention platform, with failed-payment recovery and win-back campaigns around it. AcornRetain is the cancel flow on its own: free for your first 10 live sessions a month, then $20 a month flat, with every feature on both plans. Test mode is free and unlimited.
What you keep
You get each of these here, as you do in Churnkey. If you are already running a cancel flow, this is the part you are not giving up.
- A discount that saves the cancel. The flow opens in place when a subscriber clicks cancel in your app, and an accepted discount is applied to their live Stripe subscription for you. It uses a coupon you already made in Stripe, imported into your Offers library. AcornRetain never creates one.
- A survey you write. Your question, your answers, as many as you need, and each answer picks the offers the subscriber sees: a discount for price, a pause for a break, a plan change for someone who needs less.
- Every answer kept for you to read: a Top cancel reasons chart, and each session with the answer and anything the subscriber typed.
- Pause, plan change, and trial extension offers alongside the discount. A pause stops billing, not access: the subscriber keeps using your product unless you gate it.
- Eligibility decided on our server, never in the browser. By default a subscription that already has a discount is not offered another (or the new one replaces it, if you choose), and a trial is extended once. A cooldown between offers and a cap on pauses are there when you set them.
- The same browser shape: a script tag, an init call, and a keyed hash of the Stripe customer id.
Where AcornRetain differs
One question, with room to say more
You write one multiple-choice question with any number of answers, shuffled if you like. Any answer can open a text box, so "Too expensive" can come with what they would pay, and you can end with a free-text step. There is no second question that depends on the first. Screen and button labels are in English; your question and answers can be in any language. Branding is two colours and a choice of three layouts, with no logo.
Answers you read, not an analytics suite
Reading what people said is the point. The dashboard has a Top cancel reasons chart, a session list you can filter by reason where each session opens to the answer and anything the subscriber typed, and an Answers page with every written answer in a date range. Slack alerts carry the answer and the text, and a documented session.completed webhook sends every answer, its label, and the written text to your own systems. It is built for reading; to slice it, export every session to CSV.
A flat price, not a tier to grow into
Churnkey is priced in tiers by your churn volume. AcornRetain publishes its price: free for your first 10 live sessions a month, then $20 a month (or $200 a year) for unlimited, whatever your MRR. Every feature is on both plans, every app you run is on the same bill, and Test mode is free and unlimited. You can work out next year's cost without a call.
The cancel flow, not a platform
There is no failed-payment recovery, no win-back campaign builder, no customer-health scoring, no A/B testing, and no translation of the fixed labels. Those are decisions, not a backlog. They are a real gap if you want them, and the reason the price is what it is if you do not.
When Churnkey is the better choice
If you want failed-payment recovery, win-back campaigns, A/B tests on your cancel flow, or the whole flow translated into your subscribers' languages, stay on Churnkey. AcornRetain does none of those, and pretending otherwise would waste your evaluation.
What switching involves
The browser integration has the same shape: a script tag, an init call, and a keyed hash of the Stripe customer id. Moving is a script URL swap, renaming churnkey to acornretain in the init call, and pointing the signing secret at your AcornRetain app key. The init call also needs the Stripe subscription id, so add it if yours does not pass it yet. You rebuild the survey and offers in our dashboard, which is usually an afternoon, then run the whole flow in Test mode against Stripe test-mode subscriptions before a live subscriber sees it. One limit comes from Stripe, not from us: Stripe ties a subscription to the first connected app that changes it, and the tie stays after that app is uninstalled. On a subscription Churnkey has already changed, we can read it but not write to it, so an accepted offer or a cancel there comes to you as a task in the dashboard and by email, for you to make in Stripe.
The setup guide covers the whole path, and support will look at your existing flow with you if you would rather not rebuild it from a blank page.
Questions people ask
- How is Churnkey priced, and what does AcornRetain cost?
- Churnkey is priced in tiers by your churn volume. AcornRetain publishes its price: free for your first 10 live sessions a month, then $20 a month (or $200 a year) for unlimited live sessions, whatever your MRR. Every feature is on both plans and every app you run is on one bill. Test mode is free and unlimited, so you can build and test the whole flow before you pay anything.
- Is there a cheaper alternative to Churnkey?
- If the cancel flow is the part you use, AcornRetain is one. It is free for your first 10 live sessions a month and $20 a month flat after that, with no tier that rises with your MRR or your churn. It covers the cancel flow only: the discount, the survey, and the answers. There is no failed-payment recovery, no win-back campaign, and no A/B testing.
- What does AcornRetain do that Churnkey does not, and vice versa?
- On features, not much; the difference is price and scope. AcornRetain does the cancel flow: a discount from a coupon you made in Stripe, applied to the subscription for you; a question you write, where each answer picks its own offers and can open a text box; and every answer kept for you to read, with eligibility checked on our server. Churnkey also does failed-payment recovery, win-back campaigns, A/B tests, and translated screens. AcornRetain does none of those, its survey is one question, and it costs $20 a month flat after 10 free live sessions.
- How hard is it to move from Churnkey to AcornRetain?
- It is not an engineering project. The browser integration has the same shape: a script tag, an init call, and a keyed hash of the Stripe customer id. You swap the script URL, rename churnkey to acornretain in the init call, point the signing secret at your AcornRetain app key, and pass the Stripe subscription id if you do not already. Then you rebuild the survey and offers in the dashboard and run them in Test mode against Stripe test-mode subscriptions before going live. One limit comes from Stripe: a subscription Churnkey already changed stays tied to its app, so an offer or cancel on it arrives as a task for you to finish in Stripe.
- Is AcornRetain Stripe-only?
- Yes. AcornRetain connects to Stripe by installing the AcornRetain app from the Stripe App Marketplace, and every offer it applies uses a coupon or price that already exists there, or changes the subscription itself, as a pause or a longer trial does. It opens from a cancel button in your own app, with a server that signs the Stripe customer id. If your subscribers cancel through Stripe's hosted Customer Portal and you have no server of your own, point your cancel links at a cancel page we host instead.
Try it before you switch anything.
Test mode is unlimited on every plan, so you can run the whole flow on test subscriptions in Stripe before a live subscriber sees it.
Churnkey is a trademark of its respective owner. AcornRetain is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Churnkey. This page describes our own product and our understanding of a publicly documented alternative; check their current documentation and pricing before you decide.