Most SaaS founders track churn rate.
But I wanted to see where the money is actually leaking from.
Failed payments.
Cancelled subscriptions.
Silent cancels you never followed up with.
So I made a free churn leak report that shows how much MRR may be leaking and where to act first.
Check your churn leak here:
https://churnnote.com/tools/churn-leak-score
Churn tracker sheet:
Churn reason categories sheet:
This started from one annoying thing I kept noticing with SaaS churn.
Not because I wanted to build another dashboard.
Tbh I think most founders already have too many dashboards.
When someone cancels, the flow is usually:
Stripe notification
small pain
maybe check their account
move on
That’s it.
At least that’s how I used to think about it.
But after a few cancellations, it started feeling wrong.
We track everything before someone becomes a customer.
Landing page visits
signups
trials
activation
MRR
But when a paying customer leaves, the actual reason usually disappears.
Maybe it’s in Gmail.
Maybe it’s in a Stripe note.
Maybe it’s in Notion.
Maybe you remember it for 2 days and then forget.
And without that feedback, you’re mostly guessing.
Was it pricing?
Was onboarding confusing?
Was one feature missing?
Did the card fail?
Was it just a bad fit?
So I made a very basic spreadsheet.
Nothing impressive.
Just columns like:
customer
why they cancelled
category
is this fixable
should I follow up later
did we fix the thing they complained about
And weirdly, even that ugly sheet made churn feel different.
Because “churn” is too broad.
Someone leaving because pricing is too high is not the same as someone leaving because onboarding was confusing.
Someone leaving because one feature is missing is not the same as someone whose card failed.
But most of the time, all of it becomes one sad number.
The follow-up part annoyed me the most.
Example:
someone cancels because you don’t have Slack integration.
Two months later, you ship Slack.
Do you actually go back and tell that person?
Most founders probably don’t.
Not because they don’t care.
They just forgot who asked.
The feedback got buried.
The product improved, but the person who wanted that improvement never heard about it.
That felt like a stupid leak to me.
Not just a revenue leak.
More like a memory leak.
I also looked at a few churn tools.
Most of them felt built for bigger SaaS companies.
If you’re doing $1k, $2k, even $5k MRR, paying a few hundred dollars per month just to understand cancellations feels painful.
Like yes, churn matters.
But early founders are also trying not to burn money on another expensive tool.
That’s why I started with the spreadsheet first.
Cheap.
Manual.
Ugly.
But useful.
Then I thought this should just run quietly in the background.
Customer cancels or payment fails.
Plain-text email goes out automatically.
Customer replies with the real reason.
Reason gets saved and grouped.
Founder sees what needs fixing.
Later, if that thing is fixed, you know who to follow up with.
That’s the flow I wanted.
Set it up once.
Then it keeps catching the reasons you would normally lose.
If someone leaves because of pricing, you know.
If someone leaves because of onboarding, you know.
If someone leaves because of a missing feature, you know.
If someone leaves because their card failed, you don’t treat it like normal churn.
That spreadsheet eventually became the idea behind ChurnNote.
Basically, I wanted the messy cancellation notes, replies, failed payments, and follow-ups to stop disappearing.
Not trying to build a giant customer success platform.
Just trying to stop founders from guessing why customers leave.
Curious how other SaaS founders handle this.
Do you actually track why people cancel?
Or is it mostly Stripe email, feel bad, move on?
Not a huge number, but this one feels different.
A founder actually paid for something I built.
The best part is not even the payment. We spoke after he tried it, and he already gave me useful feedback on how he thinks about churn, what he expects from a tool like this, and what would make it even more valuable for founders.
It’s a small win, but it made the product feel real for the first time.
That first payment notification hits different.
random question for people running small saas
when someone cancels, what do you actually do?
i feel like a lot of us just see the stripe email, feel bad for a minute, maybe click into the user, and then move on
but do you actually have a process?
like:
do you ask why they left
do you track the reason anywhere
do you separate failed payments from real cancellations
do you ever follow up later if you fix the thing they complained about
or is it mostly just “damn that sucks” and back to trying to get more users?
curious because churn feels like one of those things everyone talks about, but early founders probably handle it pretty randomly
The worst part of churn isn’t always the lost revenue.
It’s when someone leaves and you learn absolutely nothing.
No reason.
No reply.
No clue what actually went wrong.
So you start guessing.
Maybe it was price.
Maybe onboarding was confusing.
Maybe they never got the value.
Maybe they found another tool.
Maybe they just didn’t care enough.
And that guessing can send you in the wrong direction for weeks.
A cancelled customer is painful, but it’s also useful signal.
They saw the promise, tried the product, and still decided not to continue.
That’s worth understanding.
Curious how other founders handle this:
Do you actually follow up with cancelled customers, or do you mostly just move on?
I’ve been thinking about this recently.
When someone cancels and picks “too expensive,” I’m not sure that always means the pricing is actually wrong.
A lot of times I feel like it really means something else, like:
Because the same product can feel expensive at $9/mo if the user doesn’t see clear value.
And another product can feel cheap at $99/mo if it clearly saves time, makes money, or removes a painful problem.
So I’m starting to think “too expensive” is often just the easiest reason users give when the deeper issue is value clarity.
Curious how other SaaS founders think about this.
When users cancel because of price, do you treat it as a pricing problem or do you try to dig deeper?
