The product was rarely why people canceled. Four things that actually showed up across 13 SaaS teardowns.

I scored public cancellation feedback for a dozen well-known SaaS companies.

G2, Hacker News, the threads people write when they walk. Slack, Figma, Notion, Linear, Evernote, Calendly, HubSpot, a dozen more.

What surprised me: the product was almost never the reason.

Figma's editor is still best in class. Linear is still one of the best built tools out there. People didn't leave because the software got worse.

They left over four things, and it was the same four every time.

1. The bill changed after they were committed.

Not a number on a pricing page. A number that moved once leaving got painful.

One Slack customer on HN: "Onboarded one price, rebilled at three times that." A Calendly user said the price went up a year in and they switched in an afternoon. Monday.com runs a cancellation-warning banner every team member sees daily, on top of random increases.

The cancel decision gets made the moment the number moves, not when a feature ships.

2. Per-seat pricing punished the teams that grew.

The customers who succeed with you are the ones the meter turns on.

A Linear review nailed it: "amazing for 10 engineers, brutal for 80 because it's per seat." A HubSpot user watched a seat restructure 5x their bill overnight.

You build the price to scale with the customer, then act surprised when scaling is the exact thing that makes them leave.

3. They paywalled something the customer already had.

Different from raising a price. This is pulling an existing thing behind a higher tier.

Asana moved SSO to the top tier and a customer said compliance forced their hand. Evernote slashed the free tier to 50 notes after years. A HubSpot user described paying "to restore features we already had."

Taking something away reads as a different kind of betrayal than charging for something new.

4. The switching cost they were counting on was a bluff.

Every one of these companies assumed lock-in protected them. Mostly it didn't.

Calendly: "switched to a competitor in an afternoon, did not lose a single booking." Figma lost 40 designers to Penpot in two weeks after a 33% hike.

The moat you think you have is theoretical until someone's annoyed enough to test it. Then you find out.

Through line for me: churn here is a trust event, not a quality event.

People don't cancel the day the product disappoints them. They cancel the day the money or the access changes in a way that feels like the deal moved. The feedback reads like a diary of that moment, not a product review.

Curious from the operators here: when you've lost customers, was it actually the product, or was it one of these four?