The email you'd write yourself, if you had the time
Every customer who cancels gets one short, plain-text question from your address — minutes after they leave, while they still remember why.
The real interface, with sample data from a fictional company. Click through it.
It doesn't look like software
No logo, no tracking pixel, no star rating, no branded template. Plain text from your address, signed with your name — the same thing you'd have typed manually.
It arrives at the only moment that works
Minutes after the cancellation, while the reason is still fresh and they're still thinking about you. A week later they've moved on and won't reply to anything.
Replying costs them nothing
There's no form to open and no page to load. They hit reply in the client they already have open, type a sentence, and they're done.
Why not a survey?
An exit survey asks someone who has just decided to stop giving you money to click a link, load a page, and fill in a form. Almost nobody does, and the people who do are systematically the angriest — which quietly skews everything you learn.
More detail
An email that can be answered by replying removes every step between the question and the answer. The customer doesn't have to decide to "go and do a thing." They just answer, in their own words, at whatever length they feel like.
Free text is also the point. A dropdown forces someone to pick the closest of your five guesses. An open question lets them tell you the thing you didn't think to list — which is usually the thing worth knowing.
From samir@northwind.io
Subject: quick question
Hey Maya — saw you cancelled today. No hard feelings, and I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. Just one question, because it genuinely helps: what made you decide to leave?
Sent from your verified domain
No logo, no survey link, no tracking pixel. Plain text, because plain text gets replies.
You control every word
The default email is short and deliberately unpolished, because that's what gets replies. You can rewrite it entirely, keep your own subject line, and set the name and address it sends from.
More detail
You can also run several variants at once to see which phrasing your customers actually respond to, and switch between an AI-written email that adapts to each customer's context and a fixed template you've written yourself.
What actually happens
- Cancellation detectedFrom your billing provider, the API, a webhook, or a CSV import.
- Short delayA couple of minutes, so the email doesn't collide with your provider's own cancellation receipt.
- Email sent from your domainThrough your own verified sending domain, so it authenticates as you and lands in the inbox.
- Reply routed backTheir reply is captured, threaded, and handed to the follow-up and tagging steps.
Sending is capped, on purpose
A cancelled customer receives at most two messages per interview: the question and one follow-up. That limit is enforced in the send path, not by policy — the code checks before every message goes out.
More detail
Every email carries an RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe header, so a single click in their mail client stops everything permanently. No landing page, no confirmation step, no dark pattern.
The founder who kept meaning to ask
You've told yourself for a year that you'll start emailing churned customers. You did it twice, got two genuinely useful answers, and then a busy month happened. WhyLeft is that intention, running whether or not this month is busy — and unlike you, it never skips the awkward ones.
Questions about this
Will my customers know it's automated?
The email is plain text, sent from your address, signed with your name, with no tracking pixel, no logo, no survey link and no unsubscribe footer beyond the legally required one-click header. It arrives minutes after they cancel, which is exactly when a founder would have written it.
When they reply, the reply goes into a real conversation. Most people never think about it.
Will people actually reply?
More than reply to a survey link — because it isn't one. It's one question from a human address that they can answer by hitting reply, without leaving their inbox or loading a form.
We don't publish a promised reply rate, because yours will depend on your product, your relationship with your customers and how you word the question. You'll see your own rate in the dashboard from your first cancellation.
How many emails does a cancelled customer get?
At most two: the exit interview and one follow-up. That cap is enforced in code, not by policy — the send path checks it before every message.
Win-back emails are a separate, opt-in flow that only goes to customers whose stated reason you've actually addressed.
Can customers opt out?
Every email carries an RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe header, so a single click in their mail client stops everything — no landing page, no confirmation step, no dark pattern. Unsubscribes are honoured immediately and permanently.
Related
Your next cancellation is coming.
It can be another number on a chart, or the reason you build the right thing next quarter.
No credit card. Cancel in one click — we'd rather you tell us why.