Cancellation Timing

The Cancellation Timing report answers a question the other churn reports can't: when in their lifetime do customers cancel? Instead of measuring how much churn happened in a calendar period, it looks at a cohort of customers and shows how far into their paid life they were when they left.

This is one of the most useful lenses for diagnosing why customers churn. A cohort that drops sharply in its first days or weeks is usually telling you about onboarding, activation, or a mismatch between what was sold and what was delivered. A cohort that bleeds slowly and steadily over many months is a different problem — value erosion, competitive pressure, or budget cycles — and needs a different fix.

You'll find it as a tab in the Churn report group.

The cohort

The report starts from a cohort of customers who first started paying within the selected date range. That's the population being measured — not everyone who churned in a period, but everyone who began their paid relationship in the window you picked.

For each of those customers, GrowPanel measures the time from when they started paying to when they cancelled (for those who have cancelled). The chart then buckets the cohort by that elapsed time.

Because the denominator is the whole cohort — including the customers who are still active — the curve never reaches 100%. It tops out at the cohort's overall churn rate. If 1,000 customers started paying and 200 have since cancelled, the line flattens at 20%, no matter how long you follow it.

Reading the chart

The chart has two views, switched from the toolbar:

• Cumulative % (default)

  A line showing the share of the cohort that had cancelled by each point in their lifetime — by day 1, by week 1, by month 3, and so on. Because it's cumulative, the line only ever rises or flattens. The shape is what matters: a steep early climb means early-life churn; a straight, gentle slope means churn is spread evenly across the lifetime.

• Count

  A bar per period showing the raw number of customers who cancelled at exactly that point in their tenure. This is the "distribution" view — useful for spotting a specific spike, such as a cluster of cancellations right after a 12-month contract or a trial-to-paid boundary.

Two controls shape the x-axis:

• Interval — whether each bucket represents a day, week, month, quarter or year of tenure. Use days or weeks to inspect early-life churn in detail; use months for a longer view.
• Range — how far into the customer lifetime to plot, from First 3 months out to First 5 years. Pair a long range with a monthly interval for a lifetime view, or a short range with a daily interval to zoom in on the first weeks.

Standard date and segment filters apply to the cohort, so you can compare, say, how quickly Enterprise customers cancel versus self-serve, or whether one acquisition channel front-loads its churn.

The table and drill-down

Underneath the chart, a table lists each tenure bucket with both the cancellation count and the cumulative percentage of the cohort. Click any count to open a detail table of the exact customers who cancelled at that point in their life — with their paid-start date, cancel date, cancellation reason and current status — and click through to any customer from there.

You can download the full distribution as CSV from the report toolbar, and the detail table has its own CSV download.

How to use it

• Find your riskiest window. If the cumulative curve is steepest in the first two weeks, that's where to concentrate onboarding and activation effort — small improvements there compound across every future cohort.
• Separate onboarding churn from value churn. Early, front-loaded churn is usually a fit or first-value problem. Late, evenly-spread churn is usually an ongoing-value problem. The shape tells you which battle you're fighting.
• Check the boundaries. Spikes at contract-renewal points (e.g. exactly 12 months) in the Count view often reveal customers who never intended to renew — a signal for proactive outreach ahead of the renewal date.
• Compare cohorts and segments. Filter by plan, market, channel or any segment to see whether a particular slice of the business churns faster, and how early.