Ready to Stop Building What You Can Buy?
Questions? Talk to us. We're happy to discuss your specific use case and help you make the right decision.
Should You Build Your Own Retention Solution? Build vs. Buy Analysis
Unless retention tools ARE your core product, buying ChurnCut makes more financial and strategic sense than building.
Why? Three reasons: cost, velocity, and opportunity cost.
After Our Analysis, Building Costs 5–10x More Than Buying
Teams underestimate build time and overestimate their ability to maintain it. Even with AI, you'll spend 65–115 hours in year 1. ChurnCut? Under 2 hours to set up.
Building Traditional (No AI)
$15k–29kYear 1 Total
If your dev time is worth $100/hr, that's $10k–17k initial build plus $5k–12k maintenance in year 1.
- Initial build: 60–100 hours
- Integrations: 20–40 hours
- Testing & edge cases: 20–30 hours
- Total: 100–170 hours
Ongoing:
- Maintenance: 5–10 hrs/month
- New features: 15–30 hrs each
- Stripe API changes: unpredictable
Building with AI Tools
$10k–21kYear 1 Total
Yes, it's faster with AI. But debugging AI-generated code adds 15–25 hours.
- Initial build: 20–40 hours
- Debugging AI code: 15–25 hours
- Integrations: 15–30 hours
- Testing: 15–20 hours → Total: 65–115 hrs
The real cost isn't the initial build. Every time your CS team wants to change copy, test a new offer, or try a different flow — that's a dev ticket. Back to you.
Buying ChurnCut
$2,400–6,000Year 1 Total
- ✓Setup: 1–2 hours
- ✓First flow live: same day
- ✓Your team iterates without you forever
Velocity: You're Competing Against a Full-Time Team
We ship new features every week. You'd be shipping new retention features every few months (if that).
The question isn't just about time to v1. The pace of improvement matters more.
When you build it yourself
Your iteration cycle: weeks to months.
- New feature? Dev time, testing, deployment.
- Test new offer? Code change, deploy.
- Fix edge case? Debug, fix, test, deploy.
- Stripe API update? Hope it doesn't break.
- Growth team wants to experiment? Backlog ticket, wait for sprint.
With ChurnCut
Iteration cycle: minutes to hours.
- ✓Your team tests new offers in minutes. No code, no deploy.
- ✓We handle Stripe API changes before you even know about them.
- ✓Edge cases? We've seen them across hundreds of SaaS companies.
- ✓Growth team experiments? They just do it. No dev needed.
We're working on retention flows full-time. You'd be doing it part-time while building your actual product. The gap compounds. Fast.
Why spend time building what a dedicated team is already full-time improving?
Your developers should build your differentiator. Retention flows aren't what makes your product unique — your core features are.
Building a full team is obviously overkill. Year 1 cost: $250k–400k in salaries and infrastructure. Every year after that: $150k–250k maintenance. Time to first results: 6–12 months. Nobody does this anymore.
But even building it yourself with AI means 65–115 hours that could go to your actual product roadmap.
The real question in 2026:
Can I just code it myself?
You're technical. AI coding tools exist. You're thinking you could probably build a simple version in a weekend.
There's no such thing as a simple version.
What You're Actually Building
That "weekend project" is actually a 3–6 month initiative.
Core Infrastructure
- Stripe integration for subscriptions, payment methods, invoices
- Webhook handling for subscription updates, payment failures, cancellations
- Authentication and user session management
- Hosted flow UI that actually looks good
- Mobile responsive design
Retention Logic
- Conditional flow logic (if plan = X show offer Y)
- Discount and offer management
- Pause subscription flows
- Downgrade options
- Payment update flows for failed cards
- Win-back email sequences
Edge Cases You'll Hit
- Customer has multiple subscriptions
- Subscription is past due vs actually canceled
- Card expired vs insufficient funds vs fraud
- Customer already used a discount code
- Proration calculations for mid-cycle changes
- Webhooks that arrive out of order
- Race conditions between customer action and Stripe update
Operations & Analytics
- A/B testing framework
- Analytics dashboard (save rate, flow performance)
- Customer journey tracking
- Team permissions and access
- Compliance (GDPR, PCI for payment data)
Iteration & Maintenance
- Non-technical team can edit flows
- Multi-variant testing
- Flow versioning
- Preview mode before publishing
- Rollback capability
When to Build vs Buy
Build in-house when:
- You have 3–6 months to wait for results
- You can dedicate 1–2 engineers long-term
- Retention flows ARE your core product
- You have highly specialized needs ChurnCut can't handle
- You want your dev team maintaining cancellation flows instead of building features
Buy ChurnCut when:
- You need to reduce churn now, not in 6 months
- You want your developers building your actual product
- You want your CS/Growth team iterating flows without dev tickets
- You prefer tested integrations that actually work
- You want continuous improvements without paying for development
- You'd rather avoid edge cases that only show up in production
Bottom Line
Your dev time is the most expensive resource your company has.
You can spend 100+ hours building a basic retention flow, then 5–10 hours every month maintaining it, plus unpredictable time debugging edge cases and Stripe API changes.
Or integrate ChurnCut in an afternoon and let your team iterate without you.
Your developers should be building features that differentiate your product — not re-inventing cancellation flows.
FAQ