Cancellation survey software for SaaS and subscription teams

Most subscription products already ask "why are you canceling?" with six radio buttons. The data it produces is tidy and nearly useless. Sixty percent pick "too expensive" because it is the polite answer. Nobody clicks "your onboarding lost me in week one", even when that is the truth.

The useful answers sit in the open question after the dropdown, and that is where completion falls apart. A customer who has already decided to leave will not type three sentences into a box. They will say them in fifteen seconds if you let them, and they often say the sentence you needed, such as "I never got the import to work and gave up".

• Pair one multiple choice question with one open question, and let the open one be answered by voice or video.
• Keep the whole flow under a minute, since the customer is already annoyed.
• Read the themes weekly, not quarterly, so a broken onboarding step shows up while it still matters.

Five checks separate a tool you will keep from one you will stop reading in a month.

• Open answer formats. Can the customer speak or record instead of type? Spoken answers run longer and name specifics.
• Automatic themes. Does it group hundreds of answers and link each theme to quotes, or hand you a spreadsheet?
• Placement. Can you embed it on the cancel page, send it by email after cancellation and share it as a link in a support reply?
• Seats. Customers are not seats, but your product, support and finance people who read results are. Check whether the plan is per user or per workspace.
• Export and hooks. Can answers flow into your CRM or data warehouse for churn analysis?

Keep the reason picker if you have one. It gives you a clean count. Add a survey for the open answers behind the count.

Start with the decision, not the questions. If you want to know whether price or product is driving churn, you need one choice question and one open question. If you want to know where onboarding fails, add a question about the first week.

A set that works for most subscription products has three questions. First, a single choice on the main reason for leaving. Second, an open question, "What was the one thing we should have done differently?", answered by text, voice or video. Third, a yes or no on whether you can follow up. Place it on the cancellation confirmation page, and send the same link by email to people who cancel through support.

Read the first thirty answers before you change anything. Themes usually emerge by then, and one or two of them will be a surprise.

A cancellation survey only reaches customers who choose to leave. A good share of lost subscribers never decide anything: their card failed and nobody chased it. That is a billing problem, solved by recovering failed payments with a tool like failed payment recovery for SaaS, not by asking questions. Measure the two separately, or you will read payment failures as dissatisfaction and fix the wrong thing.

The survey pays for itself when answers change what you do. Three habits turn exit data into revenue.

• Route price objections to a downgrade offer on the cancel page, and track how many accept.
• Send the product themes to the team that owns that part of the product with the quotes attached. A recorded customer saying "I could not find the export" is harder to ignore than a chart.
• Contact accounts that agreed to a follow-up within two days, while the memory is fresh.

For the employee side of the same idea, see our exit survey software page. For the full range of options, compare survey tools.

A reason picker costs nothing extra. General survey tools run from a few dozen dollars a month to enterprise contracts, and many charge per seat or cap responses, so check both before you commit. Asked is priced per workspace: Starter is $49 a month with 500 responses, Growth is $129 a month with 2,500 responses and 5 seats, Business is $299 with 15 seats. Cancelling customers never count as seats. See pricing for the full list.

A cancellation survey is a short set of questions shown to a customer when they cancel a subscription. It records the main reason for leaving and an open comment, so the business can fix the causes of churn and decide which customers are worth a win-back offer.

Ask three. A single choice question on the main reason for leaving, an open question on what you should have done differently, and a yes or no on whether you may follow up. Keep it under a minute so people finish.

Show it on the cancellation confirmation page, because the reason is fresh and the customer is already in the flow. For people who cancel through support, send the same link by email within an hour. A second short survey weeks later gets fewer answers.

Yes. In Asked, any open question can be answered by typing, speaking or recording a short video in the browser, and every answer is transcribed and grouped into themes. Spoken answers tend to be longer and more specific than typed ones.

Asked starts at $49 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly, with voice and video answers and AI themes on every plan. Pricing is per workspace, so cancelling customers never count as seats. Most subscription teams that survey every cancellation choose Growth at $129.