Paddle analyze cancellations explained: what it changes

What launched on November 9, 2026

Paddle has added a cancellation flow sessions report, and its changelog dates the release Report release date: November 9, 2026 according to Paddle (2026). It lists each session, once it ends, in which a customer went through one of your Cancellation Flows, so you can see the cancellation reason, the discount offer the customer saw, what they decided, and whether the session ended salvaged, failed to salvage, or abandoned.

For a small online store, the first decision is not about the report's features. The report only reaches sellers whose subscriptions already run on Paddle, and Paddle's restricted-products page lists "Physical products or products that require physical delivery" among items you cannot sell. The same page says that if the sale of physical goods is your primary offering, Paddle "is not a good fit for your needs" (Paddle help center, last updated 13 April 2026). If you sell physical goods, the real question is whether the subscription tool you already use can export the same three things: the reason, the offer, and the outcome.

A cancellation flow session is one customer's pass through a cancellation flow, from the moment they try to cancel to the outcome that gets recorded. Paddle's Retain documentation describes the flow as a survey, then a salvage attempt such as contacting support, a plan switch, a pause, or a fallback discount, and only then the cancellation itself (Paddle docs).

You can generate the report from the Paddle dashboard or through the API, for any date range. The API call is a POST to /reports with "type": "cancellation_flow_sessions" in the body, and the response returns 201 Created with a pending status while the file is prepared. Three filters are available: cancellation_flow_session_created_at for a date range, cancellation_flow_id for one or more flows, and cancellation_flow_session_resolution for the outcome. If you omit a gte filter on creation date, the report covers sessions created in the month before you generate it.

If Paddle has told you that your cancellation flow is moving from ProfitWell to Paddle Billing, the changelog says the report will be switched on automatically over the next few weeks. Otherwise, the changelog says no action is needed, and the change is non-breaking for existing integrations.

TL;DR: the new report shows why subscribers cancel, what they were offered, and whether the offer kept them. It helps only if your subscriptions run on Paddle and you sell digital products. If you sell physical goods, use this month to check whether your current tool can produce the same three fields.

Key Takeaways

• Paddle's report lists ended cancellation-flow sessions with the reason given, the offer shown, the customer's decision, and the outcome.

• It is a Paddle feature, and Paddle's help center prohibits physical products, so a physical-goods store cannot use it on Paddle.

• Paddle's published pay-as-you-go rate is 5% + 50¢ per Checkout transaction. The vendor has not published a price for the report, and standalone Retain pricing is quote-based.

• Stripe's customer portal offers 8 cancellation reason options and a retention coupon, but its page describes where reasons appear, not a salvage-outcome report.

• Benchmarks are directional: budget limitations were 32.97% of voluntary churn in Churnkey's 2024 data, and a 2022 median puts consumer goods and retail at 3.50%.

• This month, act on the report only if your subscriptions already run on Paddle. Everyone else should check their current export and their online cancel path.

How we evaluated these options

This is an informed buyer's guide built from public pages, not a hands-on trial. We scored the options on seven criteria, weighted by how much each one changes the decision for a small store. The weights are our judgment, not a vendor figure, and they are shown so you can change them.

Eligibility is weighted highest because Paddle's restricted-products rule can remove the platform before any feature is considered. The next two weights reflect switching cost. The three systems compared here are the new Paddle report, the ProfitWell Retain system that the changelog says some accounts are migrating from, and Stripe's customer portal, the main subscription-billing rival whose cancellation features are published.

Head-to-head on what you actually decide

Read the table as a list of what each page states. The Paddle report is the only one of the three whose page names a per-session outcome, a date filter, and an API endpoint together. The ProfitWell page describes cancellation insights and merchant-chosen reasons, but it names no export, date filter, or outcome field (ProfitWell help). A blank cell means the page we read did not say, not that the feature is absent.

Stripe's portal page says cancellation is enabled by default, and that you can offer a retention coupon from the Cancellations section of portal settings (Stripe docs). Paddle's flows offer contacting support, a plan switch, a pause that starts at the next billing period, and a fallback discount (Paddle docs). Both approaches can keep a customer; the difference is what you can see afterward.

When NOT to use US Tech Automations: skip a proposed workflow if the Paddle dashboard already answers your question, because the report lives there and needs no build. Skip it if you have only a handful of cancellations a quarter, where one person reading the rows in a spreadsheet costs less than a workflow. Skip it if your subscription app already exports reasons and offers on a schedule you trust.

What it costs: published rates

Paddle publishes one usage rate: Paddle pay-as-you-go rate: 5% + 50¢ per transaction according to Paddle (reviewed 2026). The same page lists a custom tier with no price, so that tier is quote-based.

Pricing checked November 9, 2026.

Stripe publishes two separate rates for a card sale that also runs through its billing product: Stripe's pay-as-you-go rate: 0.7% of billing volume according to Stripe (reviewed 2026), plus 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge. The arithmetic below is illustrative and uses only those published rates.

The two totals are not like-for-like. Paddle's rate is a single combined fee, and the pages do not say what each Stripe rate covers beyond the fee itself, so read both sets of terms before you compare them.

Who this is for

Who this is for: an owner or operations lead whose store sells digital subscriptions such as software, courses, or downloads, already bills them through Paddle, and wants to know why people cancel before the next renewal cycle.

Red flags: you sell physical products, even alongside digital ones; your subscriptions run on a billing system other than Paddle, and moving is not on the plan; or you expect one month of data to show a pattern in a store with few cancellations.

Stripe's portal is the better fit for owners whose subscriptions already run on Stripe and who need reason capture and a retention coupon, but not a per-session outcome report. ProfitWell is a migration path for accounts the changelog names, not a choice for new buyers.

Decision checklist before you act

1. Do you sell physical products, even part of your range? If yes, Paddle is out, and the rest of this checklist applies to your current tool.

2. Are your subscriptions already on Paddle? If not, the report does not reach your data.

3. Can you pull last month's sessions and see the reason and the offer for each one?

4. Do the sessions that ended as failed to salvage show a repeated reason, or are they scattered?

5. If you sell auto-renewing subscriptions to California customers, does your online cancel path match the way they signed up?

A worked example from one month of sessions

Illustrative example, not a customer: a store that sells a digital subscription at $25 a month records 120 cancellation sessions in one month. Filtering the Paddle report with cancellation_flow_session_resolution set to failed_to_salvage isolates the sessions that ended in a cancellation, and suppose 45 of the 120 land there. That is 37.5% of sessions (45 ÷ 120). At $25 a month, those 45 subscribers represent $1,125 of monthly recurring revenue (45 × $25). If the reason field shows that most of the 45 chose a price reason, the next step is to check which offer each of them saw before changing any offer, because the report records the discount shown alongside each outcome.

A proposed workflow for the report's output

This is a proposed, configurable workflow for a digital-subscription store, not a deployed one. The trigger is a monthly schedule, such as the first business day of each month. The action calls POST /reports with cancellation_flow_session_resolution set to failed_to_salvage and a creation-date range covering the prior month, then checks the report status until it leaves pending and downloads the rows. The output is a sheet with one row per session showing the reason, the offer shown, and the resolution. Prerequisites: API access to your Paddle account, which the changelog does not describe, so confirm the authentication model in the API reference; a named owner for the sheet; and a decision on where the sheet is stored. US Tech Automations would configure the schedule, the status check with a retry limit, and the sheet write.

The second step is the review point. The workflow groups the failed sessions by reason. Reasons that read as price go to a review queue for an offer decision, and reasons that point to support or technical problems go to whoever owns those fixes. No discount change, customer email, or plan edit happens automatically; a person approves each one, and US Tech Automations could configure that approval as a required gate. If you sell physical goods, the same design runs on whatever export your subscription tool produces, provided it includes the reason and the offer shown. Confirm that before you build anything.

Build it yourself, or configure it

Zapier, Make, and n8n are the usual options for a team that wants to script this pull itself, or for an in-house script. Those tools can keep run histories, retries, and error branches, and they can leave an audit trail, when you configure them to. The buyer still designs and owns the rest: observability, meaning knowing a run failed; idempotency, so a retry does not send a second win-back email; escalation paths; access controls on the exported data; and maintenance when the API changes. A proposed US Tech Automations design would cover the same run-history, retry, and approval points, but you still need to own the access rules and the upkeep. The prerequisites are the same either way: API access, a named owner, and a person who signs off on offer changes.

For the order side of this problem, see our Shopify Flow order automation guide. For reconciling cancellations of products, see our post on automating product cancellation reconciliation. If you are choosing an AI model to summarize the export, our GPT-5.6 Sol alternatives post covers the options that came after the Astra launch.

Benchmarks: why people say they leave

Churnkey's State of Retention 2025 report gives a reason mix for 2024 data, and budget limitations were the largest category: Budget limitations: 32.97% of voluntary cancellations in 2024 according to Churnkey (2025 report). Churnkey sells retention software and says it analyzed over $3 billion in subscription revenue and 3 million cancellation sessions, so its mix reflects its own customers. Use it as a direction, not a forecast for your store.

A different cut comes from a 2022 article that cites Mercator Advisory Group. It gives a median for consumer goods and retail: Consumer goods and retail median voluntary churn: 3.50% according to PaymentsJournal (2022 article). The article gives no sample size or data period, and it has no e-commerce row, so treat it as older context rather than a current baseline.

Signal vs speculation: what is confirmed and what is our read

Confirmed on vendor pages: the release date, the report's columns and filters, the API call and its pending status, the default date range, the automatic switch-on for accounts moving from ProfitWell, Paddle's pay-as-you-go rate, and Paddle's prohibition on physical products.

Vendor claims, not independent results: Paddle's Retain page says "Reduce plan cancellations by up to 30%" and "Cut customer churn by 25-30%, automatically, with Retain" (Paddle Retain page). The customer-portal changelog says Cancellation Flows can retain over a quarter of at-risk customers and reduce ARR churn by 5% on average (Paddle changelog). Neither page explains how these figures were measured.

Not published by the vendor: the price of the report, any row or file limits, the export file format (the concept page does not mention CSV), the API authentication model, and a standalone price for Retain. Where we say a price is quote-based, the vendor has not put one on its public pricing page.

Our read, which is opinion: the report is most useful when a store has enough ended sessions each month to see a repeated reason. A single small month can show noise, so compare several months before you change a plan. The offer data is the part to check first, because a save that comes with a deep discount can still reduce revenue, and the report shows the offer alongside the outcome for that reason.

Regulatory context, from independent sources: the Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC's click-to-cancel rule on July 8, 2025, according to JD Supra (2025), so the federal rule did not take effect before its compliance date. California's amended automatic renewal law took effect July 1, 2025, according to Fenwick (2024 article). As Fenwick summarizes it, cancellation must be offered through the same medium used to sign up, and a retention offer is allowed only if a click-to-cancel link stays visible. Read the statute and talk to counsel before you change anything.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Reading the report as all cancellations. It covers only sessions that went through a cancellation flow and have ended.

• Forgetting the default window. Without a creation-date start filter, you get the prior month only.

• Counting "salvaged" as saved revenue without checking which offer produced it.

• Assuming a physical-goods store can use Paddle's report because it has a subscription product.

• Copying a vendor's churn-reduction percentage into your own forecast.

• Using a vendor's benchmark, such as Churnkey's mix, as your store's baseline.

Questions buyers ask first

Does the Paddle cancellation flow sessions report cost extra?

The vendor has not published a price for the report, so ask Paddle directly before you plan a budget around it. The changelog gives a release date and filters but no price.

Can a small online store that sells physical products use it?

No, not on Paddle. Its help center lists physical products as a prohibited category, so a store that sells physical goods needs another source for the reason, offer, and outcome fields.

How is this different from ProfitWell Retain?

The ProfitWell page describes cancellation insights and merchant-chosen reasons, and it names no export, date filter, or outcome field. The new Paddle report adds a per-session outcome filter, a date filter, and an API endpoint, per the Paddle changelog.

What does Stripe's portal give you for the same question?

Stripe's portal page lists 8 cancellation reasons, a retention coupon, and the places where reasons appear, including the subscription.updated webhook. It does not describe a report of salvage outcomes.

Do I need to change my cancel button this month?

Check it now if you sell auto-renewing subscriptions to California customers, because the amended law took effect July 1, 2025 and requires cancellation through the same medium used to sign up. Confirm the details with counsel rather than relying on a summary.

This month's decision

If your subscriptions already run on Paddle and you sell digital products, pull last month's sessions using the filters above, and read the offer column before you change anything. If you sell physical goods, the decision is about your current tool: confirm that it exports the reason, the offer, and the outcome. If it does not, a proposed workflow of the kind described above can fill the gap, and see how US Tech Automations configures this for the setup steps.