Frequently asked questions

What does AcornRetain do?

It adds a cancellation flow to your subscription product. When a customer clicks cancel, AcornRetain asks why they're leaving and makes one retention offer (a discount, a pause, a plan change, or a trial extension), then applies the outcome to their subscription.

Does it work with Stripe?

Yes. You connect it by installing the AcornRetain app from the Stripe App Marketplace, with no secret key to paste. AcornRetain then applies accepted offers and cancellations directly to the customer's Stripe subscription.

How are offers applied?

You configure the offers using your existing Stripe objects: coupons, prices, and plans. When a subscriber accepts, AcornRetain applies that offer to their subscription for you. It never creates new billing objects on its own.

Does a paused subscriber keep access?

Yes, unless you gate it. A pause stops billing, not access: AcornRetain pauses collection on the Stripe subscription and nothing else, so the subscriber keeps using your product until billing resumes. To make a pause cut access too, check for it in your app where you already check whether someone has paid.

Can customers farm discounts?

Only as far as your rules allow. Eligibility is checked on our servers, not in the browser. By default a subscription that already has a discount is not offered another, and a trial can be extended once. You can also set a cooldown between offers and a lifetime cap on pauses. Those two are off until you set them.

How is subscriber data handled?

For your subscribers, we act as a processor: we handle their billing identifier, survey answers, and the offer outcome only to provide the service to you. See our Privacy Policy and Security pages for details.

What does it cost?

There's a free tier with 10 live cancel-flow sessions a month (unlimited in Test mode), and Pro at a flat $49/month for unlimited live sessions. Both plans include unlimited apps on one bill, with no MRR tiers and no cut of saved revenue. See the Pricing page.

What is churn in SaaS?

Churn is the rate at which subscribers cancel over a given period. Customer churn counts the percentage of subscribers who leave; revenue churn (or MRR churn) counts the percentage of recurring revenue that leaves with them, which matters separately because your highest-paying accounts don't cancel at the same rate as your cheapest ones. Both are usually measured monthly or annually — a rate on its own is meaningless without saying which.

What does a 20% churn rate mean?

It depends entirely on the period. A 20% monthly churn rate is severe — it implies losing a fifth of your subscriber base every month, which very few subscription businesses survive for long. A 20% annual churn rate is unremarkable for many consumer and small-business SaaS products. Always check whether a churn figure, yours or a benchmark you're comparing it to, is monthly or annual before drawing a conclusion from it.

For the longer version, the guide to reducing churn covers the tactics behind these answers. Still have a question? Contact us.