Retently
Ask customers why they will leave before they do
Retently is a customer experience and feedback platform that runs NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys across email, SMS, in-app, link, embedded, kiosk, and feedback-button channels, then uses AI to classify the responses, route detractors to the right team, and trigger automated follow-up. Its retention angle is early warning: it identifies the customers whose sentiment has turned before that turns into a cancellation, and drives close-the-loop workflows to convert detractors back into promoters.
Overview
Retently was founded in 2016 and operates from Palo Alto, bootstrapped with no outside funding. It sits in a different position from most of this category: rather than intercepting a cancellation or retrying a card, it collects stated sentiment and tries to act on it before either of those moments arrives. That is a weaker signal than behavior in isolation and a genuinely useful one in combination, which is the right way to think about buying it.
The product is broad for its price. Three survey methodologies (NPS for loyalty, CSAT for interaction satisfaction, CES for effort), seven delivery channels including SMS and kiosk, an AI agent that reads survey responses alongside customer reviews and support tickets to surface what is breaking and why, and automation that routes feedback by sentiment and urgency to alert the right people. Twenty-plus integrations cover ecommerce, support, and CRM, and the Pro tier ships an MCP server so Claude or ChatGPT can query the feedback directly.
Pricing is published and self-serve, which is the entry requirement for this list. Ecommerce Basic is $99 a month for 2,500 surveys, 10 campaigns, and 3 seats. Ecommerce Pro is $299 for 20,000 surveys, 10 seats, API access, the MCP server, and a data migration concierge. Both carry a 14-day trial with no credit card, and both can be upgraded, downgraded, or cancelled at any time. Enterprise is quote-based and adds Salesforce and a dedicated account manager.
The honest caveat sits in the naming. The plans are labelled for ecommerce even though Retently positions itself for B2B as well, and survey volume rather than customer count is the metered unit, which makes the fit for a small B2B SaaS with a few hundred accounts a little awkward at $99 for 2,500 surveys. More importantly, sentiment is a leading indicator and not an intervention. Retently will tell you a customer is unhappy; whether anything happens next depends entirely on whether someone acts on the alert.
Best for
Subscription and ecommerce businesses that already have a retention motion and want an earlier warning signal for it, particularly teams running a customer success or support function who will actually act on a detractor alert rather than letting it sit in a dashboard.
Not the right fit for
- Companies whose churn is mostly failed payments. Retently has no dunning, no retries, and no billing integration in that sense, and asking a customer how they feel does nothing about an expired card.
- Teams with nobody to act on the feedback. A detractor alert that reaches an empty inbox is worse than no survey, because you have now asked a customer to complain and then ignored them.
- Very small B2B SaaS companies. At $99 a month for 2,500 surveys, the metered unit does not match a business with 150 accounts, and the plans are explicitly named for ecommerce.
- Anyone expecting a churn prediction engine. Retently reports sentiment and classifies feedback; it does not build a weighted behavioral health score from product telemetry the way a customer success platform does.
- Companies wanting cancel flows or deflection offers. Nothing here intercepts a cancellation or presents a pause or discount.
How it works
- 1
You connect your customer data, either through one of the twenty-plus integrations such as Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Intercom, Zendesk, or Segment, or by importing directly.
- 2
You configure campaigns choosing a methodology and a channel. NPS asks about loyalty, CSAT about satisfaction with a specific interaction, and CES about how much effort something took. Delivery can be email, SMS, in-app, a shareable link, an embedded widget, a persistent feedback button, or a kiosk.
- 3
Surveys go out on a schedule or in response to a trigger, targeted by segment so that new customers, long-tenured accounts, and recent support contacts are asked different questions at different times.
- 4
Responses are analyzed by the AI layer, which classifies free-text feedback into themes and reads it alongside customer reviews and support tickets rather than in isolation, then reports what is breaking, why it matters, and what to do about it.
- 5
Automation routes the result: detractors are flagged for follow-up, alerts fire in Slack or by email based on sentiment and urgency, and close-the-loop workflows chase a response so a bad score becomes a conversation rather than a data point.
Feature breakdown
26 features in 5 modulesSurvey methodologies
Three standard measures, used for genuinely different questions.- Net Promoter Score
- Measures loyalty and likelihood to recommend, the standard relationship metric, best run periodically against the whole base to track direction over time.
- Customer Satisfaction
- Measures satisfaction with a specific interaction, which is the right instrument after a support ticket or an onboarding session rather than as a general pulse.
- Customer Effort Score
- Measures how much work something took the customer, which correlates with churn more reliably than satisfaction does and is the most underused of the three.
- Campaign scheduling and targeting
- Campaigns run on schedules or triggers against defined segments, so tenure, plan, and recent activity determine who is asked what and when.
- Campaign limits by tier
- Ten campaigns on both Basic and Pro, which is enough for most businesses and is not the constraint; survey volume is.
Delivery channels
Seven ways to reach a customer, which matters because response rate is the whole game.- Email surveys
- The default channel, with the usual caveat that email response rates are modest and skew toward the people with strong opinions in either direction.
- SMS surveys
- Substantially higher response rates for consumer audiences, and the channel most likely to reach a customer who has stopped opening your email entirely.
- In-app surveys
- Asks inside the product where the customer is already engaged, which produces both the best response rate and the most representative sample for a SaaS business.
- Link and embedded surveys
- Shareable links and surveys embedded in existing pages or emails, for cases where you want to gather feedback without running a campaign.
- Persistent feedback button
- An always-available way for customers to volunteer feedback, which catches the frustrated customer at the moment of frustration rather than weeks later on a schedule.
- Kiosk surveys
- For physical locations and events, which is unusual in a SaaS-adjacent tool and reflects the ecommerce and retail side of the customer base.
AI analysis
The 2026 layer, and the part that turns free text into something usable.- AI feedback classification
- Automatically sorts free-text responses into themes, which is what converts a pile of comments nobody reads into a ranked list of problems. Included from the Basic tier.
- Multi-source analysis
- The AI agent reads survey responses alongside customer reviews and support tickets rather than surveys alone, so a theme appearing in all three registers as more urgent.
- Actionable surfacing
- The agent is positioned to identify what is breaking, why it matters, and what to do next, rather than producing a sentiment percentage and stopping there.
- MCP server
- Pro tier exposes feedback through the Model Context Protocol so Claude or ChatGPT can query it directly, which is a genuinely useful way to interrogate qualitative data without exports.
Automation and close the loop
Where feedback becomes retention work rather than a report.- AI-driven feedback routing
- Sends each response to the right team based on its content, so a billing complaint and a bug report do not both land in the same generic queue.
- Automated follow-ups
- Triggers responses to detractors automatically, which is the mechanism that turns a bad score into a saved customer rather than a recorded loss.
- Sentiment and urgency alerts
- Instant team alerts by email or Slack when a response crosses a threshold, so a serious complaint reaches a human the same day.
- Close-the-loop workflows
- Structured processes for converting detractors into promoters, which is the specific retention claim Retently makes and the reason it belongs in this category.
- Customer segmentation
- Target surveys and route responses by segment, so a high-value account's detractor score triggers a different response from a trial user's.
Integrations and access
Twenty-plus connectors, with API and concierge migration on the upper tier.- Ecommerce connectors
- Shopify, Klaviyo, and Gorgias, reflecting a customer base that leans heavily toward direct-to-consumer brands.
- Support platform connectors
- Zendesk, Intercom, and Richpanel, which allow CSAT surveys to fire automatically after a ticket is resolved.
- CRM connectors
- HubSpot and Pipedrive on the self-serve tiers, with Salesforce reserved for Enterprise, which is a notable gate for B2B buyers.
- Zapier, Slack, and Segment
- Covers workflows outside the native connector list and pipes feedback events into a broader data stack.
- API access on Pro
- Programmatic access is a Pro feature at $299, so anyone wanting to push survey triggers from their own product must be on the upper tier.
- Data migration concierge
- Pro includes assisted migration of historical feedback from another platform, which preserves trend data that would otherwise be lost in a switch.
Use cases
4 documentedSaaS support lead measuring ticket quality
Tickets are closed with no idea whether the resolution actually satisfied anyone, and the only feedback arriving is from customers angry enough to escalate.
CSAT surveys fire automatically from Zendesk or Intercom after resolution, and low scores route straight back to a human with the ticket context attached.
Ecommerce brand losing repeat customers quietly
Repeat purchase rate is falling and nobody knows whether the cause is product quality, shipping times, or price, because no structured feedback exists.
NPS surveys over SMS and email produce a response rate worth analyzing, and AI classification ranks the actual themes instead of leaving someone to read a thousand comments.
Customer success team wanting an earlier warning
Health scores are built on usage and billing signals, which turn negative only after a customer has already mentally left.
NPS and CES responses provide a stated-intent signal that often moves before behavior does, feeding into the existing retention process as one more input rather than replacing it.
Founder who wants to interrogate feedback conversationally
Hundreds of survey comments sit in a dashboard nobody has time to read, and specific questions require exporting to a spreadsheet each time.
The Pro tier MCP server lets Claude or ChatGPT query the feedback directly, so asking what enterprise customers said about onboarding last quarter takes a sentence rather than an afternoon.
Pricing
from $99 per month (Ecommerce Basic)Flat monthly subscription metered by survey volume, with seats and API access varying by tier. No percentage of revenue and no per-response fee.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce Basic | $99 per month |
Survey volume rather than customer count is the meter, which fits ecommerce better than a small B2B SaaS with a few hundred accounts. |
| Ecommerce Pro | $299 per month |
The eightfold jump in survey volume for triple the price makes Pro better value per survey, but API access being gated here is a real constraint for product-triggered surveys. |
| Enterprise | Quote custom |
Salesforce being Enterprise-only is worth flagging for B2B buyers whose CRM is the whole point of the integration. |
Billing notes
- No percentage of revenue is involved. Retently has no recovery product and touches no payments, so the revenue-share question that dominates the dunning half of this category does not apply here at all.
- For scale comparison: at $50,000 MRR, Retently at $99 to $299 a month is 0.2 to 0.6 percent of revenue, which is defensible if the feedback drives action and pure cost if it does not.
- Survey volume is the meter, not customers or seats, so a business that surveys frequently can outgrow Basic quickly while a business with more customers but less frequent surveying stays cheap.
- All plans allow upgrading, downgrading, or cancelling at any time, with no annual commitment required, which is unusually flexible for this price point.
- API access sits on the $299 Pro tier. If you want surveys triggered by events in your own product rather than on a schedule, that is your real entry price.
- Salesforce is Enterprise-only, so a B2B company running on Salesforce cannot get its core integration on any published plan.
Value assessment: Retently is well priced for what it does and easy to overvalue for what it does not. Three methodologies, seven channels, AI classification from the entry tier, and an MCP server on Pro is a lot of capability for $99 to $299, and the flexibility of month-to-month with no commitment lowers the risk further. But it produces a signal, not a save. Every dollar of value depends on someone acting on a detractor alert, and companies without a customer success or support motion to receive that alert will get a well-designed dashboard and no retention improvement. Buy it as an input to a process you already run, never as the process itself.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Three survey methodologies covering genuinely different questions, rather than the single NPS score most competitors stop at.
- Seven delivery channels including SMS, in-app, kiosk, and a persistent feedback button, which matters because response rate determines whether any of the data means anything.
- AI feedback classification included from the $99 entry tier rather than reserved for an expensive upper plan.
- The AI agent reads reviews and support tickets alongside surveys, so themes are corroborated across sources instead of resting on one channel.
- Close-the-loop automation and sentiment-based routing turn a score into assigned work, which is the only thing that makes feedback a retention tool.
- An MCP server on Pro lets Claude or ChatGPT query feedback directly, which is a genuinely better way to interrogate qualitative data than exporting.
- Published self-serve pricing, a 14-day trial with no card, and month-to-month terms with no commitment.
- Bootstrapped and independent since 2016, with no outside funding and therefore no pivot or acquisition pressure.
Limitations
- It prevents no churn on its own. Retently produces a signal and an alert; if nobody is staffed to respond, you have added a survey and changed nothing.
- No dunning, no card retries, no cancel flows, and no offers, so the entire involuntary-churn half of this category is untouched.
- Stated sentiment is a weaker predictor than behavior. A customer who scores you a 9 and then leaves is a common and frustrating outcome, and NPS response samples skew toward the strongly opinionated.
- Plans are named and shaped for ecommerce, and survey volume as the metered unit fits a small B2B SaaS poorly.
- API access is gated to the $299 Pro tier, which is the practical entry price for anyone wanting product-triggered surveys.
- Salesforce integration is Enterprise-only, a significant gate for B2B buyers whose CRM is precisely where the feedback needs to land.
- Support on Basic is limited to knowledge base and email, with Zoom and live chat reserved for Pro.
Head-to-head comparisons
3 alternativesRetently vs Akita
from $49 per month (Small Teams)Akita builds behavioral health scores across billing, support, and usage data and drives CSM playbooks from $49 a month; Retently collects stated sentiment through surveys from $99. Sentiment is one input into a health score, not a replacement for one. A B2B SaaS with a customer success team should buy Akita first and add Retently as a signal source; an ecommerce brand with no CSM function gets more from Retently alone.
Full Retently vs Akita comparisonRetently vs ChartMogul
from $0 under $10,000 MRR, then $59 per month (Starter)ChartMogul reports what customers actually did with their money and is free under $10,000 MRR; Retently reports what they say they feel, from $99. Behavior is the more reliable signal and the cheaper one to start with. Run ChartMogul first to know whether you have a churn problem at all, then add Retently to understand the why behind the number.
Full Retently vs ChartMogul comparisonRetently vs Baremetrics
from $75 per month, or $49 per month billed annually (Launch)Baremetrics measures revenue and sells a dunning add-on that actually recovers money; Retently measures sentiment and routes complaints to humans. They address opposite ends of the problem and neither substitutes for the other. If you can only fund one, take the one that recovers revenue, because involuntary churn is the cheapest churn to fix and sentiment work is slower to pay off.
Full Retently vs Baremetrics comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- A day to first campaign. Connect a data source or import customers, choose a methodology and channel, write the question, and send. The in-app and feedback-button channels require a small front-end embed, which is the only engineering work involved.
- Learning curve
- Low to send surveys, moderate to run a program that works. The genuine skills are in survey timing (asking at the wrong moment produces garbage), sampling (avoiding fatigue while getting enough responses to be representative), and building the follow-up process that makes the data worth collecting.
- Onboarding
- Self-serve from a 14-day trial with no credit card. Basic gets knowledge base and email support; Pro adds Zoom and live chat plus a data migration concierge; Enterprise adds dedicated onboarding and an account manager.
- Migration notes
- Historical feedback and score trends are the thing worth migrating, since an NPS number means nothing without the trend behind it. Pro includes a data migration concierge specifically for this. Coming from nothing, expect the first two or three months of scores to be uninterpretable until you have a baseline.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web appEmail and SMS deliveryIn-app survey embedEmbedded and link surveysFeedback buttonKiosk modeMCP server on Pro
- API
- API access on the Pro tier and above for triggering surveys and pulling responses programmatically. An MCP server on Pro exposes feedback data to Claude and ChatGPT directly.
- Compliance
- GDPRStandard data protection controls for survey response data
- Security notes
- Retently holds customer contact details and survey responses rather than payment data, so it stays out of PCI scope. The main consideration is that free-text feedback frequently contains information customers did not intend to be widely readable, which makes access control and retention policy worth configuring deliberately.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email support and knowledge base on BasicZoom and live chat on ProDedicated account manager on Enterprise
- Documentation
- Knowledge base at retently.com covering campaign setup, the twenty-plus integrations, survey methodologies, and automation workflows.
- Community
- No public forum; the company publishes an extensive editorial library on NPS benchmarks and customer experience practice.
Company
- Founded
- 2016
- Headquarters
- Palo Alto, California, United States
- Ownership
- Independent and bootstrapped
- Employees
- Small team, not publicly disclosed
- Funding
- No outside funding raised; the company has been bootstrapped since founding in 2016.
Timeline
- 2016Founded as an NPS platform for subscription businesses, bootstrapped with no outside funding.
- 2019Expands beyond NPS to CSAT and CES, covering relationship, interaction, and effort measurement in one product.
- 2021Broadens delivery beyond email to SMS, in-app, embedded, link, kiosk, and persistent feedback buttons, with twenty-plus integrations across ecommerce, support, and CRM.
- 2024Adds AI feedback classification, automatically sorting free-text responses into themes rather than leaving them to manual reading.
- 2026Ships an AI agent that analyzes surveys alongside reviews and support tickets, plus an MCP server on the Pro tier for querying feedback through Claude and ChatGPT.
Integrations
- Shopify
- Klaviyo
- Gorgias
- Zendesk
- Intercom
- Richpanel
- HubSpot
- Pipedrive
- Salesforce (Enterprise only)
- Segment
- Slack
- Zapier
- API on Pro and above
- MCP server for Claude and ChatGPT on Pro
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Retently?
Retently is a customer experience platform that runs NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys across email, SMS, in-app, link, embedded, kiosk, and feedback-button channels, uses AI to classify the responses, and routes detractors to the right team with automated follow-up. Its retention role is early warning: spotting customers whose sentiment has turned before it becomes a cancellation.
How much does Retently cost?
Ecommerce Basic is $99 a month for 2,500 surveys, 10 campaigns, and 3 seats. Ecommerce Pro is $299 for 20,000 surveys, 10 seats, API access, an MCP server, and a data migration concierge. Enterprise is quote-based and adds Salesforce and a dedicated account manager. Both self-serve plans have a 14-day trial with no credit card and can be cancelled at any time.
Does a survey tool actually reduce churn?
Not by itself, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Retently produces a signal and an alert. Whether that becomes a saved customer depends entirely on someone acting on it. Companies with a support or customer success function to receive detractor alerts get real value; companies without one get a well-designed dashboard and unchanged churn, plus a set of customers who were asked to complain and then ignored.
Does Retently take a percentage of revenue?
No. It is a flat monthly subscription metered by survey volume, with no revenue share and no per-response fee. Retently touches no payments and has no recovery product, so the percentage-of-recovered-revenue question that dominates the dunning half of this category does not arise.
Which is more useful, sentiment data or behavioral data?
Behavior, if you can only have one. A customer who has stopped logging in is a more reliable churn signal than a customer who gave you a 6, and NPS samples skew toward people with strong opinions in either direction. Sentiment is valuable as a second input and as the source of the why behind the number, which behavioral data cannot tell you. Use both if you can, and start with behavior.
Does Retently do health scoring?
Not in the customer success sense. It reports sentiment scores and classifies feedback themes, but it does not build a weighted behavioral health score from product usage, billing status, and support signals the way a platform such as Akita does. Retently's output is often used as one input into a health score computed elsewhere.
How much engineering work does Retently need?
Almost none for email and SMS campaigns, which run entirely from the connected data. In-app surveys and the persistent feedback button need a small front-end embed. Triggering surveys from events inside your own product requires the API, which is gated to the $299 Pro tier, so budget accordingly if that is your intended pattern.
Does Retently work for B2B SaaS with annual contracts?
It works, with two caveats. The plans are named and shaped for ecommerce and metered by survey volume, which suits a business with many customers surveyed occasionally rather than a few hundred accounts. And Salesforce, the CRM most B2B companies run on, is Enterprise-only. Where it genuinely helps is annual contracts, since sentiment is one of the few signals available months before a renewal that no dunning tool can reach.
Should a five-person SaaS buy Retently first?
No. The order that makes sense for a small team is to fix involuntary churn with a dunning tool, get an accurate churn number from a free ChartMogul plan, and only then spend $99 a month asking customers how they feel. Sentiment work is the slowest of the three to pay off and the one most dependent on having someone available to act on what you learn.
Who owns Retently?
It is independent and bootstrapped, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Palo Alto, with no outside funding raised. That means no acquisition or pivot pressure and a product that has developed steadily for a decade, at the cost of a smaller team and slower feature velocity than venture-backed competitors.
Editorial verdict
Retently is a good feedback platform sitting at the edge of a retention category, and buying it well means being clear about that. Three methodologies, seven channels, AI classification from the entry tier, and an MCP server on Pro is genuinely a lot of capability for $99 to $299 a month, and month-to-month terms with a no-card trial make it easy to test. The signal it produces is real and often moves before behavior does, which is valuable if you have annual B2B contracts that no dunning tool or cancel flow can reach. But it saves nobody on its own. Every dollar of return depends on a human receiving a detractor alert and doing something about it, and if that human does not exist you have bought a survey tool and called it retention. Third or fourth purchase in this category, not the first.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.