What our cancelling users actually told us (we stopped guessing after this)
we were losing users every month.
no idea why. analytics showed numbers going down but
never told us the reason. surveys? 3% response rate.
offboarding emails? "not the right time." useless.
one day we just put a chat on our cancel page. not a
fancy tool. just — catch them right when they click cancel
and ask what went wrong.
what came back broke us a little:
a safari bug had been silently killing trust for weeks.
we had no idea. a solo founder loved the product but
couldn't justify the price after tax. two users were
already 80% moved to a competitor — not because we were
worse, but because we never showed them we were better.
none of this was in our analytics.
none of this came from surveys.
it only came out when we caught people at the door.
one week of those conversations changed how we think
about retention completely. we stopped optimizing
dashboards and started actually listening.
built flidget.com out of this — for founders who are
tired of watching users leave without knowing why.
what's your current method for getting honest
cancellation reasons?
This actually solves a very real timing problem. By the time you ask a user why they canceled, they’ve mentally checked out already.
Curious, have you noticed any difference in response rates when the chat appears right on cancel compared to sending an email after?
Yes, the difference is significant. In-page response rates are sitting around 60 to 70 percent. Post-cancel emails rarely break 10 percent in our experience, and even when they do reply the answer is vague because the moment is gone.
The reason is pretty simple. When someone clicks cancel they still have a reason in their head, a specific thing that broke or frustrated them. Catch them there and they'll tell you exactly what it was. Email them two days later and they've moved on mentally, so you get "not the right time" or nothing at all.
The timing is everything. Same question, completely different answer depending on when you ask it.
The safari bug finding is the one that would keep me up at night. That's a user who experienced a broken product, decided it wasn't worth reporting, and just left. You'd never catch that in a survey because from their perspective the product was just bad — they don't know it's a bug vs. a feature gap.
The price-after-tax founder is interesting too. I wonder how many SaaS companies lose solo founders specifically because pricing pages show pre-tax numbers and the actual invoice hits different. Especially international customers where VAT adds 20%+.
Did these conversations change what you actually prioritized on the roadmap? Because it sounds like without this, the safari bug might still be unfixed.
Which product are you working on? Happy to give you first month on us — would love to hear what your cancel page reveals.
exactly right on the safari bug. the worst part was he had been working around it for weeks. that is not a user who hates your product. that is a user who wanted it to work badly enough to keep trying. and we still lost him.
the price after tax thing hit harder than expected. we had assumed price complaints meant the product was not worth it. turns out some of it was just math. a $49 plan becomes $59 after VAT for a solo founder watching every dollar. completely different conversation than "your product is too expensive."
and yes it changed everything on the roadmap. the safari bug was fixed in two days. we would never have found it otherwise. it is sitting undetected somewhere in your product right now too most likely. the users who hit it just leave quietly.
we've been staring at dashboards for months. this is the wake up call we needed.
exactly. dashboards tell you what happened. never why. that's the gap.
Super insightful — the shift from dashboards to real conversations is
Catching users at the exact moment they cancel is where the real truth comes out.
Love how this turned into something like — solving a problem most founders don’t even realize they have.
spot on. the truth only comes out when you catch people at the right moment. glad it resonated!