Becoming Retention Infrastructure: MCP, Open Source SDK, and Hosted Cancel Flows

A few months ago, a customer told me they'd been waiting for over a month for their Engineering team to ship the Churnkey Cancel Flow script. That meant four weeks of customers cancelling without ever seeing an offer or collecting feedback. Four weeks where the work was done on our side and stuck on theirs.

That conversation kept haunting me. Then there was the agency that managed dozens of sites on a particular CMS and couldn't drop our script into a hosted platform; the support lead who still handled cancellation requests manually because there was no way to give a customer a clean link to a signed Cancel Flow.

Then we realized: we'd built the best retention engine in SaaS but forced everyone into one install path.

Churnkey is now retention infrastructure

In 2021, we started with Cancel Flows. But what we've realized over the years is that Cancel Flows is a UI. Now, anyone can ship top-tier UIs with their agent of choice.

That's not where we excel, and it's not how we've endured. What Churnkey really offers is retention infrastructure: our expertise, our data, our benchmarks, our decision engine. The intelligence behind retention decisions at scale in real time.

Today, we're leaning into our strengths, and announcing three new releases:

• Open-source cancel flows. MIT license, on GitHub, drop into any React app. Anyone can run them standalone, or you can connect them to Churnkey's intelligence and analytics infrastructure.
• Hosted Cancel Flows. Connect a billing provider, share a link. The full Churnkey Cancel Flow on a Churnkey-hosted URL. No embed, HMAC, backend, or Engineering tickets required.
• The Churnkey MCP server. Bring your Churnkey data into Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI agent in one npx command. Run any query or command you can think of across Payment Recovery and Cancel Flow activities.

Let's dive deeper into each release.

Churnkey Cancel Flows are now open source

For the first time, every line of the Churnkey Cancel Flow is on GitHub under an MIT license.

All of our baseline Cancel Flow capabilities are now in a single repo with three packages:

• @churnkey/react: the Cancel Flow itself. Ships as a drop-in component, a headless hook, or a framework-agnostic core state machine. Supports React 18 and 19.
• @churnkey/node: server-side HMAC helper. Generates session tokens for @churnkey/react and HMAC hashes for the existing embed.
• @churnkey/mcp: the MCP server we'll come back to in a minute.

You can use the SDK three ways:

• Drop-in components: styled, accessible, production-ready out of the box.
• Headless hook: bring your own UI, keep the logic, analytics, and offer handling.
• Core state machine: framework-agnostic primitive for advanced wiring.

The <CancelFlow /> component is intentionally readable. Survey, offers, feedback, cancellation confirmation, and more. Composed declaratively, with callbacks that wire to whatever billing system you use.

Why open source it? Because a closed cancel flow UI layer became a tax on trust. If the smartest engineers and product people can't read the code that runs at the most sensitive moment in the customer relationship, they'll write their own, and they'll get it wrong. We'd rather hand them the production-grade version and let them build on it.

There are three ways to use the open-source cancel flow with us:

• Standalone. No Churnkey account, your backend. The flow is yours. Wire it to your own billing and ship. Remix and edit as you see fit. Our team has worked tirelessly to make this experience expansive, considered, and beautiful.
• Free with an account. Plug in a Churnkey workspace API key and get dashboard analytics for free: save rates by reason, by offer, by segment.
• On a paid plan. Add Adaptive Offers, A/B testing, Feedback AI, Session Recordings, and the rest of the Intelligence stack.

The open-source version is the floor, not a teaser. Read the docs at sdk.churnkey.co, or star us on GitHub at github.com/churnkey/sdk.

Hosted Cancel Flows

The single most common reason a Churnkey customer hasn't shipped yet is that their Engineering team hasn't gotten to it. Today, we're pushing aside that obstacle.

Hosted Cancel Flows is a no-code, no-embed delivery mode for the same Churnkey Cancel Flow you already know. Connect a billing provider, share a link. The full engine (segmentation, adaptive offers, subscription pauses, exit surveys, Feedback AI, session recordings, A/B testing) runs on a Churnkey-hosted page reached by a URL you generate.

There are three ways to install it. Pick the one that matches your constraints:

• API sessions. Your backend calls POST /v1/cancel-sessions, gets a URL back, and redirects the customer. One backend call, no frontend SDK. The pattern mirrors Stripe's Customer Portal.
• Dashboard-generated links. Support agents can generate bespoke Cancel Flow URLs on a customer record, set expiry constraints, and copy a URL to send by email or SMS. Audit-logged and revocable.
• Email verification. No backend required. Your customers enter their email, get a six-digit code, and drop into the flow. This is a no-code fallback for companies who can't ship a backend endpoint.

All three paths converge on the same Cancel Flow engine, with customizable branding, our robust dashboard analytics, and expansive A/B tests.

Hosted Cancel Flows unlock the work our traditional in-app experience couldn't reach:

• Platforms that block custom scripts (third-party sites, e-commerce builders, payment orchestrators) can put the link on their cancel button and be done.
• Support teams who need to generate a cancel link from any customer record and send it by email or SMS, with a structured save-attempt path instead of cancelling directly.
• Companies that need to go live before engineering can prioritize the embed can stand up a proper Cancel Flow literally within minutes.

See more here or schedule a demo and we'll walk you through it.

The Churnkey MCP server

More often now, the person asking "why did churn spike last week?" isn't a person. It's an agent to whom someone on the team asked the question.

If Churnkey is going to be retention infrastructure, agents have to be first-class consumers of our data, not just humans clicking through a dashboard.

So we're proud to introduce our new MCP server. It's an open-source Model Context Protocol server that brings your Churnkey data into any MCP-compatible AI agent. Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, the works. Install with one command:

npx -y @churnkey/mcp

Just plug in the Data API key from your Churnkey dashboard and your agent can analyze:

• Cancel Flow sessions, outcomes, and segments
• Analytics: save rates, trends, segment performance
• Data Streaming Reports (DSR): the raw retention dataset

What this looks like in practice: you can ask Claude "show me every session in the last 30 days where the customer hit a pause offer but cancelled anyway, and tell me what they said in the exit survey." And get the answer, from your data, in seconds.

The MCP server is 100% open source and free on every Churnkey plan, including Starter.

We'll be pushing more MCP capabilities shortly, including write actions, not just reads, with explicit safety rails.

What this means for you

If you're able to ship code: the SDK is on GitHub right now. Use it standalone. Bring your own billing. If you want analytics, AI offers, A/B testing (and more) later, plug in a Churnkey account.

If your team can't ship an embed: Hosted Cancel Flows ships today. Learn more about it or book a demo. You can be live this week.

If you're already asking AI your hardest retention questions: install the MCP server with one npx command, plug in a Data API key, and your agent can answer from your actual data tomorrow.

More to come...

We're early on this. The work goes wherever customer relationships do, and we're following it.

If you've been waiting for the version of Churnkey that fits your stack, there's no excuse not to get started now.

Schedule a demo or get started.