Pricing
Run it yourself
Discount Guardian
Standardizes every discount on the structure with causal evidence behind it, substituting a forever-percent discount at the moment any discount is created.
11.2 percentage points of churn removed by forever-percent discounts
more than 100,000 subscriber pairs
Established by controlled experiment.
How we grade evidence →Event trigger · Edition 1 · June 2026
What is it?
Most teams treat a discount as a number. The research behind this tactic says the structure matters more. Across more than 100,000 subscriber pairs, forever-percent discounts (a percentage off for the life of the subscription) cut churn by 11.2 percentage points. That effect belongs to the shape of the discount, not its depth. This tactic makes the proven shape the default: whenever a discount is created, in the billing pipeline or as a cancel-flow offer, it resolves the discount to a forever-percent structure before it reaches the subscriber.
The premise is that discount policy should be set once, with evidence, rather than re-decided ad hoc at every creation point. Operators keep full control of depth and eligibility. The tactic standardizes the structure, so every discount a subscriber sees carries the configuration with a measured retention effect behind it.
When it fires
The trigger is the creation event itself. A discount drafted in the billing provider, generated by campaign tooling, or selected as a cancel-flow offer passes through the tactic before it is applied. The tactic resolves the structure to forever-percent, sized to preserve the intent of the original, and passes it on.
Firing at creation rather than downstream is the design decision that makes the tactic cheap to run: one policy point, applied uniformly, covering everywhere discounts originate. The alternative, discount rules maintained by hand in each place, drifts the moment anyone ships a new campaign.
What the evidence shows
Forever-percent discounts cut churn by 11.2 percentage points across more than 100,000 subscriber pairs, one of the four effects in the research dataset graded as almost certainly causal. The research compared each discounted subscriber against a statistical twin, a subscriber identical on plan value, tenure, and engagement, so the effect belongs to the discount structure rather than to who receives it.
The aggregate scale is what makes standardization worth automating: across the platform, the gap between everyday discount practice and the proven structure represents roughly $308M in addressable lifetime value. Discount structure is among the cheapest retention levers in the dataset, because it costs nothing beyond the discount already being given.
How it runs
In production, the tactic sits on the discount-creation path through the billing integration. Every new discount resolves to a forever-percent structure sized within operator-set depth bounds, and the tactic records each substitution with the original draft alongside the resolved version, so discount policy stays auditable.
Guardrails keep the policy conservative: depth never leaves the bounds the operator sets, discounts already attached to subscribers never change retroactively, and discounts never stack. One forever-percent discount per subscriber, applied once.
Run this for your business
Want to run Discount Guardian for your business? Connect the Churnkey MCP to your favorite AI agent. It reads your own usage and billing data and recommends the growth and retention plays most likely to move your LTV—starting with whether this one fits.
npm install -g @churnkey/mcpChurnkey's retention products run on the same dataset behind this tactic.
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Put the evidence to work.
The same dataset behind these tactics powers Churnkey's retention products. See what it finds in your subscription data.
