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Glossary

Voluntary Churn

Also known as: Active churn

Voluntary churn is subscription cancellation caused by a customer decision — they click cancel — as opposed to a failed payment, and it is usually a response to price, to product piling up between deliveries, or to the box becoming repetitive.

Splitting churn into voluntary and involuntary is the first useful thing a subscription business can do with the number, because the two have nothing in common except the outcome. Voluntary churn is a demand problem: someone weighed the subscription and decided against it. Involuntary churn is a plumbing problem, and the fixes do not transfer between them.

The most common voluntary triggers are over-supply (the last box has not been used yet), price sensitivity in a tight month, and sameness — the same products arriving on the same schedule with no way to steer them. Each of those is fixable without a discount: a skip, a longer interval, a swap, or a rotating selection. Reaching for a discount first trains subscribers to cancel in order to be offered one.

Curobi addresses voluntary churn with self-service controls on every plan — skip, pause, cancel, and change frequency — plus, on the Pro plan, cancellation save offers at the moment of cancellation, product swaps and next-order edits, and build-your-own and rotating curated boxes for variety.

Related terms

  • Involuntary Churn — Involuntary churn is subscription cancellation caused by a failed payment rather than a customer decision — typically an expired, blocked, or insufficient-funds card at renewal — which means the subscriber is lost while still wanting the product.
  • Churn — Churn is the rate at which subscribers cancel or lapse over a given period — the share of recurring customers a business loses — and it is the single most important number in a subscription business because retained revenue compounds while churned revenue must be re-acquired.
  • Skip vs Pause — Skipping omits one scheduled delivery and its charge while leaving the subscription and its cadence intact, whereas pausing suspends the subscription indefinitely or until a chosen date — skip answers "not this month", pause answers "not for a while".
  • Cancellation Save Flow — A cancellation save flow is the sequence a subscriber sees when they try to cancel — presenting an alternative such as pausing, skipping a delivery, changing frequency, or a retention offer — designed to keep customers who would otherwise leave over a fixable, temporary reason.

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