Comparison
A ProsperStack alternative for saving cancels on Stripe and reading why people leave
ProsperStack is a retention platform: cancel flows, plus recovery of failed payments. AcornRetain is the cancel flow on its own. When a subscriber clicks cancel, it asks the question you wrote, offers the discount or other offer you tied to their answer, and applies it to their Stripe subscription for you. Every answer is kept for you to read. It is free for your first 10 live sessions a month, then $20 a month flat, and Test mode is free and unlimited.
What you keep
You get each of these here, as you do in ProsperStack. If you are already running a cancel flow, this is the part you are not giving up.
- A cancel flow that opens when a subscriber clicks cancel, asks why, and offers a discount to stay, applied to their Stripe subscription for you. Here the discount is a coupon you already made in Stripe; AcornRetain never creates one.
- A survey you write, where each answer decides which offers the subscriber sees.
- Pauses, plan changes, and trial extensions alongside the discount. A pause here stops billing, not access, unless you gate it.
- Rules that hold an offer back from subscribers who should not get it, such as one whose subscription already has a discount.
- Cancel reasons and outcomes you can read per app, so you know why people leave and what kept the ones who stayed.
Where AcornRetain differs
A small survey, on purpose
The survey is one multiple-choice question you write, with any number of answers and an optional shuffle. Any answer can open a text box, and you can end with a free-text step. There is no second question that depends on the first, and the fixed screen and button labels are English only. If you need a longer survey or translated screens, that matters.
Every answer, where you can read it
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. Every session exports to CSV with its answer and text. 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.
Published prices
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, and nothing around it
No failed-payment recovery, no win-back campaigns, no A/B tests, no customer-health scoring, and no billing provider but Stripe. If your evaluation checklist is long, ours will look short, and some of what is missing will matter to you.
When ProsperStack is the better choice
If you want payment recovery and cancel flows from one vendor, ProsperStack covers both and AcornRetain does not. The same goes if you need A/B tests on the flow, translated screens, or a billing provider other than Stripe: AcornRetain has none of those, so check the broader tool against that list.
What switching involves
Switching means picking one of two ways in and rebuilding your survey and offers in our dashboard. With a cancel button in your own app, install our snippet on it, with a few lines on your server to sign the Stripe customer id and pass the subscription id. With no server, turn on the cancel page we host and point your cancel links at it, with no code. Build it in Test mode first, against Stripe test-mode subscriptions. Test mode is free and unlimited, so you can run the whole flow end to end 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. If ProsperStack changed a subscription through its Stripe connection, 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
- What does ProsperStack do that AcornRetain does not?
- Payment recovery, for a start: ProsperStack recovers failed payments as well as running cancel flows, and AcornRetain does not. AcornRetain also has no win-back campaigns, A/B tests, translated screens, or billing provider other than Stripe, and its survey is one question. What it does is the cancel flow on Stripe: a discount from your own coupon applied for you, a survey you write, and every answer kept for you to read.
- Can I try AcornRetain without touching my live ProsperStack flow?
- Yes. Test mode is free and unlimited, and it runs against Stripe test-mode subscriptions, so you can build the survey and offers and run the whole flow end to end while your live subscribers still see ProsperStack. Nothing changes for them until you put our snippet on your live cancel button or point your live cancel links at our hosted page.
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.
ProsperStack is a trademark of its respective owner. AcornRetain is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ProsperStack. This page describes our own product and our understanding of a publicly documented alternative; check their current documentation and pricing before you decide.