Is Churn Solution or Paddle Retain cheaper?

Churn Solution starts at $50 per month minimum on the pay-as-you-save plan (free trial). Paddle Retain starts at $0 additional for Paddle Billing customers; Paddle Billing itself is 5 percent plus 50 cents per checkout transaction (free plan available).

Churn Solution vs Paddle Retain

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Churn Solution compared with Paddle Retain

Paddle Retain is effectively free if you already bill through Paddle as merchant of record and is a strong reason to consider that switch. Churn Solution works on your existing Stripe setup without changing how you take money, at a $50 floor. If moving to Paddle is not on the table, Retain is irrelevant and this is a much better fit for a small business than the flat-fee alternatives.

Choose Churn Solution if

Small subscription businesses between roughly $5,000 and $50,000 MRR that are losing customers to both cancellations and failed cards, run on Stripe, and want a complete retention stack without committing to a flat fee that would be a painful share of revenue.

Choose Paddle Retain if

Software companies that already sell through Paddle as merchant of record, or that are choosing a billing provider and want tax compliance, subscription billing, and a full retention toolkit from one vendor at one transaction fee rather than assembling three subscriptions on top of Stripe.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Churn Solution	Paddle Retain
Category	Retention	Retention
Starting price	$50 per month minimum on the pay-as-you-save plan (free trial)	$0 additional for Paddle Billing customers; Paddle Billing itself is 5 percent plus 50 cents per checkout transaction (free plan available)
Pricing model	Choice of a performance fee on retained revenue with a low monthly minimum, or a fixed monthly fee scaled to your MRR and quoted on request.	Bundled at no additional cost into Paddle Billing's merchant-of-record transaction fee. Standalone deployment on other billing providers is quote-based and historically structured as a percentage of recovered revenue.
Free plan	No	Retain is included in full at no extra charge for every Paddle Billing merchant regardless of size.
Free trial	No standard free trial is published; the three-month money-back guarantee functions as the risk reversal instead	Not applicable; there is no separate Retain subscription to trial for Paddle merchants
Best for	Small subscription businesses between roughly $5,000 and $50,000 MRR that are losing customers to both cancellations and failed cards, run on Stripe, and want a complete retention stack without committing to a flat fee that would be a painful share of revenue.	Software companies that already sell through Paddle as merchant of record, or that are choosing a billing provider and want tax compliance, subscription billing, and a full retention toolkit from one vendor at one transaction fee rather than assembling three subscriptions on top of Stripe.
Setup time	A day or less for the Stripe path. Connect the processor, configure a flow, and swap your cancel button for the platform's call. The dunning side needs no front end change at all and can be live in an afternoon.	Payment recovery is effectively instant for Paddle merchants: enable it in the dashboard and it runs, because Paddle already processes your charges. Cancellation flows require configuring the flow and wiring the cancel action through Paddle.js, which is a small front-end task. Term optimization is configured as a campaign.
Learning curve	Low on mechanics, moderate on strategy. Building flows is straightforward; deciding which offers to make to which segments, and how much margin you are willing to give away to hold a customer, is the part that needs judgement.	Low. The recovery half requires no decisions at all. Cancellation flows involve choosing offers and their generosity, which is the same judgement call every tool in this category demands, and Retain gives you fewer levers to get it wrong with.
Platforms	Web application, In-product embedded flows, Email and SMS delivery, MCP server	Paddle Billing dashboard, Paddle.js, Legacy ProfitWell interface for cancellation flows and term optimization, Standalone connectors for Stripe, Chargebee, Zuora, Recurly, Braintree
Compliance	GDPR, Stripe verified partner	SOC 2, PCI DSS, GDPR, Global sales tax and VAT compliance as merchant of record
Founded	2022	2012
Headquarters	Not publicly disclosed	London, United Kingdom
Ownership	Privately held, no disclosed institutional funding	Venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Churn Solution

Strengths

The $50 monthly minimum makes a full retention stack affordable for companies that every flat-fee vendor in this category effectively prices out.
Covers voluntary churn, involuntary churn, and win-backs in one install rather than requiring two or three vendors stitched together.
Reactivation campaigns matched to exit reasons are a genuine differentiator; most competitors stop caring the moment the cancellation completes.
A three-month money-back guarantee if savings do not exceed fees, which meaningfully de-risks a purchase for a company with no budget for a failed experiment.

Limitations

Twenty five percent of retained revenue gets expensive exactly when the tool works, and the definition of retained revenue is the single most important term in the contract.
The fixed-price alternative is quoted rather than published, so the transparent option is only the one that varies with your results.
Small vendor with no disclosed funding, limited public customer references, and none of the institutional weight of larger competitors.
Compliance posture is not published in the detail an enterprise security review would demand, which constrains who can buy it.

Paddle Retain

Strengths

Genuinely free for Paddle Billing merchants, which makes it the only retention toolkit in this category with no incremental cost.
Covers three jobs where competitors cover one or two: failed-payment recovery, cancellation deflection, and term optimization.
Term optimization is unique in this category and attacks churn structurally by moving customers to annual terms rather than fighting each cancellation individually.
Zero installation for the recovery half, because Paddle is already processing the payments and does not need permission to retry them.

Limitations

Not really an independent product. For most buyers, evaluating Retain means evaluating whether to hand your billing to Paddle, which is a much larger decision.
Standalone pricing is unpublished and requires a sales conversation, and the historical revenue-share structure becomes expensive as recovered volume grows.
Paddle's 5 percent plus 50 cents is roughly two points above Stripe, which is a real cost if you do not need merchant-of-record tax services.
Cancellation flows are less configurable than a dedicated tool: fewer offer types, weaker segmentation, and no serious A/B testing compared with Churnkey.

Pricing compared

Churn Solution

Choice of a performance fee on retained revenue with a low monthly minimum, or a fixed monthly fee scaled to your MRR and quoted on request.

Pay As We Save25% of retained revenue, $50 minimum
Custom Fixed PricingQuoted, scaled to MRR

For a company under roughly $30,000 MRR this is among the most sensible economics in the category, because the fee scales with your size and the floor is $50 rather than $250. You get cancel flows, dunning, win-backs, and analytics that on paper match vendors charging five times more. What you are trading is vendor weight: a small team, no public funding history, and a compliance story built for small business rather than for procurement. The percentage becomes the weak point precisely when the product succeeds at scale, so treat the pay-as-you-save plan as the entry structure and plan to renegotiate to fixed pricing once the tool is provably working.

Paddle Retain

Bundled at no additional cost into Paddle Billing's merchant-of-record transaction fee. Standalone deployment on other billing providers is quote-based and historically structured as a percentage of recovered revenue.

Included with Paddle Billing$0 additional
Retain StandaloneQuote

If Paddle is already your merchant of record, Retain is free capability and there is nothing to decide; turn it on. If you are choosing a billing provider, Retain plus tax compliance plus fraud handling in one 5 percent fee is a coherent bundle that a small international software business should take seriously against Stripe plus three subscriptions. If you are committed to Stripe and only want the retention tooling, standalone Retain is the weakest option in this batch: unpublished pricing, a sales conversation, and a revenue-share structure that punishes success. The product is good; the standalone commercial terms are not.

Editorial verdict on each

Churn Solution

Innovation

Churn Solution is the answer to a question the rest of this category ignores: what does a company at $12,000 MRR do about churn when every credible vendor wants $250 a month before proving anything. A $50 floor, a fee tied to results, a three-month money-back guarantee, and a feature list covering cancel flows, dunning, and win-backs make it a rational first retention purchase for a small subscription business. Two cautions. Nail down how retained revenue is defined before you sign, because that clause is the whole deal, and plan to switch to fixed pricing once you pass roughly $30,000 MRR, at which point twenty five percent of a working tool's output costs more than a flat fee elsewhere. Small vendor, real product, sensible economics at the size it is aimed at.

Read the full Churn Solution profile

Paddle Retain

Paddle Retain is excellent value and almost impossible to evaluate on its own terms, because for most companies the real question is whether to use Paddle at all. For existing Paddle merchants there is no decision: three retention mechanisms including one nobody else builds, at zero incremental cost, with no installation for the recovery half. For companies choosing a billing provider, Retain meaningfully strengthens Paddle's case against Stripe once you price in what a tax service plus a dunning tool plus a cancel-flow tool would otherwise cost. The weak path is standalone Retain on top of Stripe: unpublished pricing, a required sales conversation, and a revenue-share structure that grows more expensive precisely as it succeeds. The cancellation flows are also thinner than a dedicated tool. Take it as a strong bundled bonus, not as the reason to change how you take money.

Read the full Paddle Retain profile

Churn Solution profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Paddle Retain last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.