“The audit caught that our ‘retained’ users were mostly on annual plans we had already discounted twice. Awkward, but useful — we stopped celebrating the wrong cohort.”
Client stories
Notes from teams who asked us to read their subscription activity — including where the work felt slower than expected.
“We hoped for a silver-bullet metric. They refused that and instead mapped where trial users stalled after day seven. Slower conversation, clearer next experiment.”
“The churn pattern brief was short — almost too short — until we saw cancels stacking on day 27. That one chart paid for the review. I still wish we had booked the longer audit earlier.”
“Health check before our investor update. They flagged that grace retries were padding the number. Embarrassing in the moment; better than explaining it later.”
Extended note: pausing vs. canceling
A mid-size media subscription in Seoul asked for a Retention Audit after leadership argued whether “pause” should count as churn. Over two weeks we reconstructed pause events beside cancels for six months of activity.
Finding: pauses preceded cancel for a large share of monthly plans, but annual plans almost never paused — they simply failed to renew. Treating both cadences with one retention definition had flattened the story. The team left with separate survival views and a clearer leadership slide, not a new vendor stack.