Comparison
For teams who have outgrown Stripe's built-in cancellation coupon
If you bill on Stripe, the Customer Portal can already show a retention coupon when someone clicks cancel, and for a lot of businesses that is the right place to start. AcornRetain is what you reach for once one discount shown to everyone, with nothing deciding who is eligible, stops being enough. It runs on the same Stripe account — this is not a billing switch.
What you keep
Everything below works the same way here as it does in Stripe. If you are already running a cancel flow, this is the part you are not giving up.
- A retention offer shown the moment a subscriber clicks cancel, in place, with no separate page to send them to.
- A cancellation reason captured from the people who decide to leave anyway.
- A discount built from a coupon that already exists in your Stripe account, applied to the subscription for you rather than handed to your engineers.
- Configured in a dashboard with no code to write, running on the Stripe account you already bill from.
Where AcornRetain differs
The reason chooses the offer
A branching survey routes each answer to the offer that fits it: a discount for the price-sensitive, a plan change for someone who needs less, a pause for someone stepping away. The built-in flow shows the same single coupon whatever the reason, and captures the reason only after the cancellation, where it changes nothing.
More than a discount
Discounts, pauses, plan changes, and trial extensions, each applied to the live Stripe subscription. The built-in deflection is a coupon; the other three saves are ones you would otherwise have to build yourself against the Stripe API.
An offer that remembers who already took it
A plain retention coupon has no memory of the subscriber in front of it, so the same person can accept it every time they open the cancel screen. AcornRetain checks each subscriber against the offers they have already been granted, on our servers, before anything is shown — so a discount you meant once a year cannot be collected every month.
The save shows up as a number
Save rate, deflection, and the recovered MRR each offer represents, reported per app. Stripe hands you the raw cancellation reasons in your own data to analyse; AcornRetain is built to report the outcome of the flow directly.
When Stripe is the better choice
If one discount shown to everyone deflects enough cancellations, nobody is collecting it over and over, and you are not yet trying to measure what the flow saves, the built-in coupon is free and already in your account. Turn it on and leave it — there is nothing here worth paying for until those limits start costing you more than a tool would.
What switching involves
You are not moving off Stripe; AcornRetain runs on it. You add our snippet to your cancel button, connect your Stripe account with a restricted key, and build the survey and offers in our dashboard. Stripe's own coupon can stay on while you run ours in Test mode against real subscriptions, and you switch the built-in one off only once you are happy with what replaces it.
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
- Doesn't Stripe already have a cancellation discount?
- It does: the Customer Portal can show a single retention coupon before the cancel button, to every subscriber, and collect a reason from the ones who leave anyway. AcornRetain is for teams that have outgrown one coupon for everyone — different reasons getting different offers, and a limit on who can keep taking them.
- Can I use Stripe's built-in coupon and AcornRetain together?
- Yes. They run on the same Stripe account, so a common path is to keep the built-in coupon live while you build and test an AcornRetain flow, then turn the built-in one off once yours is doing more than it did.
- Do I still bill through Stripe if I use AcornRetain?
- Yes. AcornRetain is not a billing provider and does not replace Stripe. It connects to your Stripe with a restricted key and applies offers to the subscriptions already there. If your billing runs on a provider other than Stripe, AcornRetain is not the tool for you.
- What does AcornRetain add over Stripe's built-in flow?
- A branching survey that routes each reason to a fitting offer; pause, plan-change, and trial-extension saves alongside discounts; a server-side eligibility check so the same subscriber cannot collect an offer repeatedly; and reporting on save rate and recovered MRR rather than raw reasons.
- Is it worth paying when Stripe's version is free?
- Only once the free version costs you more than the tool does. AcornRetain is free for your first ten live sessions a month and a flat monthly fee after that, so the honest test is whether branching, more offer types, a farm-proof cap, and save reporting keep more revenue than that fee. If they do not yet, stay on the built-in coupon.
Try it before you switch anything.
Test mode is unlimited on every plan, so you can run the whole flow against real subscriptions before a live subscriber sees it.
Stripe is a trademark of its respective owner. AcornRetain is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Stripe. This page describes our own product and our understanding of a publicly documented alternative; check their current documentation and pricing before you decide.