Cancel waterfall

Cancel is the terminal path, not a retention offer. When a customer declines everything else — or no offer is eligible — Unchurn sets cancel_at_period_end: true on the subscription and reads it back to confirm. The customer keeps access until the period ends; your dashboard records the session as a scheduled cancel.

What happens on Stripe

Unchurn calls the Stripe API to schedule the cancellation at the end of the current billing period, then reads the subscription back before closing the session. The read-back is what marks the session complete — no fire-and-forget.

Your dashboard reflects the session outcome immediately. Save-rate calculations exclude scheduled cancels that haven’t lapsed yet, so your numbers stay accurate.

Manual cancellation fallback

Some subscription shapes cannot be safely auto-cancelled: multi-item subscriptions, subscriptions with an attached schedule, subscriptions stuck on a past-due invoice, paused subscriptions. For these, Unchurn records a manual_cancellation_requested event instead of touching Stripe. The customer is told their request was received; your dashboard surfaces the task so you can finish the cancellation in Stripe directly.

See Eligibility for what routes to manual and why, and Supported subscriptions for the full list of shapes.

Where to go next

• The five offers — the strategy across all five.
• Eligibility — when the cancel runs automatically and when it routes to manual.
• Supported subscriptions — full eligibility reference.