Why did Asana and Notion both grade F on churn?

Both scored 28 out of 100 on RetentionCheck's Churn Health Score because severity of the drivers hit the floor. For Asana, aggressive billing (refund denials within minutes of charge, forced 2-seat minimums, zero renewal warnings) registered as critical. For Notion, piecemeal pricing and phantom billing (charging for users never added, gating pro features behind additional charges) registered as critical. Both products have competent core software. The grade failure is about billing trust, not product quality.

What is a Churn Health Score?

A single 0 to 100 number with letter grade A to F that summarizes retention health. Start at 100, deduct per insight: critical -20, high -12, medium -6, low -2. Grades: A = 80+, B = 65+, C = 50+, D = 35+, F = below 35. Anyone can generate one for free at retentioncheck.com/try by pasting cancellation feedback.

Is Asana really refusing refunds minutes after charging customers?

Yes, per verbatim Trustpilot reviews. The most-cited example is a customer named Peter (Nov 9, 2025) who wrote Asana 'wouldn't refund us 3 minutes after we were charged. Loyal customers for years.' Multiple other reviews from Dec 2025 and Apr 2026 echo the same pattern: refund requests denied, renewal notifications absent, unsubscribe flow broken. The gist with full quotes is public at gist.github.com/brianfofficial.

What are customers actually saying about Notion's pricing?

Trustpilot reviews describe piecemeal and phantom billing. Alasdair (Feb 10, 2026): 'paying 50 GBP a month for something I didn't use.' Robert Marler (Mar 20, 2026) upgraded to Pro and found that his agent feature required an additional charge on top of the Pro license. Isaac (Feb 12, 2026): 'They can bill you for users you never added.' Pattern: users feel pricing is opaque and additive beyond the tier they purchased.

How do I run a similar churn analysis on my own SaaS?

Paste your cancellation feedback (exit surveys, Trustpilot reviews, support tickets, cancelled-subscription notes) into retentioncheck.com/try. Free, no signup. Thirty seconds later you get a Churn Health Score, grade A to F, five ranked drivers with severity and confidence, verbatim customer quotes backing each insight, and a priority action.

Two SaaS Unicorns, Same Disease: Why Asana and Notion Both Graded F on My Churn Tool

A RetentionCheck churn teardown of Asana + Notion

TL;DR

Grade

F / F (28 / 28)

Sample

15 Trustpilot reviews (9 Asana + 6 Notion)

Top driver

Billing trust collapse

Both products at the grading floor (28/100). Same disease underneath: refund denials, forced tier inflation, phantom billing.

Methodology: 15 verbatim public Trustpilot reviews (9 for Asana, 6 for Notion) spanning April 2025 to April 2026. Analyzed with RetentionCheck. Every quote is public, cited in-line, and archived in a public gist.

Two of the most recognizable names in SaaS both graded F on my churn tool this morning. Same score. Same letter. Same underlying disease.

Asana: 28/100, grade F. Notion: 28/100, grade F. I did not tune the tool to produce that symmetry. The data did that.

The Churn Health Score

Both products scored 28 out of 100 on RetentionCheck's Churn Health Score. That grade is computed from insight severity: critical drivers subtract 20 points each, high drivers subtract 12, medium 6, low 2. Starting from 100.

Both companies hit the floor on the same category: billing trust. Not product quality. Not feature gaps. Billing.

Asana: what the reviews actually say

Nine Trustpilot reviews. The pattern is consistent and it is not subtle.

"Wouldn't refund us 3 minutes after we were charged. Loyal customers for years." — Peter (Nov 9, 2025)

"They will send ZERO notifications when your renewal is due and the default account is for 50 seats." — Shannon Freeman (Jan 31, 2026)

"The basic plan requires a minimum of two seats, and the pricing is quite unclear." — Stéphane Busso (Dec 3, 2025)

"They refuse to give a refund. Have terrible customer service that just continually takes days to respond." — Lauren Houdek VonHoltz (Dec 24, 2025)

"The platform makes it extremely difficult to Unsubscribe." — Jennifer Bernthal (Apr 4, 2026)

Top 5 drivers the tool surfaced:

Aggressive billing and forced overages (critical) — 5 reviews
Unresponsive customer support (high) — 3 reviews
Account closure and unsubscribe friction (high) — 2 reviews
Pricing structure misaligned to solo users (high) — 2 reviews
Feature gaps and limited integrations (medium) — 2 reviews

The tool's priority action for Asana: implement a 24-hour refund window for charges within 48 hours of signup, stop forcing 1-seat users onto 2-seat plans, and send renewal notifications 14 days before billing rather than zero days.

Notion: different product, same shape

Six Trustpilot reviews for Notion. This is a separate dataset from the Hacker News teardown I published yesterday. The HN complaints were about feature bloat and strategic drift. The Trustpilot complaints are tighter and meaner.

"Have a nasty habit of attempting to charge you piecemeal for lots of interlinking services. Was paying 50 GBP a month for something I didn't use." — Alasdair (Feb 10, 2026)

"They will ask you to try a free plan for 1 month. Then weeks later you will receive warning that you would lose access to YOUR OWN NOTES unless you pay." — Dev Baisoya (Apr 10, 2026)

"After using notion for 5 years I upgraded to the pro plan just to be able to set an agent to categorize my notes, this would be an additional charge on top of the pro license." — Robert Marler (Mar 20, 2026)

"They can bill you for users you never added, or even if you did accidentally add them, they still didn't do anything." — Isaac (Feb 12, 2026)

"To close your account you need to provide your email that you sign into with, yet it doesn't recognise it at all." — Tim Sommerfeld (Sep 6, 2025)

The core drivers:

Piecemeal pricing and phantom billing (critical) — charging for services never used, billing for users never added
Pro-tier feature gating (high) — users who upgrade still face additional per-feature charges
Account closure and cancellation friction (high) — email verification broken for the one action that ends the billing relationship
Access-hostage billing (high) — free plan conversion threatens loss of user's own content

The shared disease

Two products with completely different feature sets. Different audiences. Different price points. Different go-to-market. Same disease shape.

The disease is billing trust collapse. Not product failure. Customers are not leaving because the core product stopped working. They are leaving because the billing relationship feels predatory.

This matters because most retention playbooks focus on product stickiness. Better onboarding. More features. Deeper integrations. None of that matters when a customer of several years cannot get a refund 3 minutes after being charged.

Trust is a retention feature. When trust breaks, product quality becomes irrelevant.

Why Trustpilot reviews are a better churn signal than your exit survey

Your exit survey asks people who are already leaving and still want to be polite. Trustpilot reviews are written by people who have already left and have nothing to lose.

The language is sharper. The specifics are uglier. The billing complaints that your exit survey buries under "price" are exposed on Trustpilot as "refund denied 3 minutes after charge" and "paying 50 GBP a month for services I did not use."

If your SaaS has 50+ customers and you have never pulled your own Trustpilot reviews into a churn tool, you are missing the sharpest public signal about why people leave you.

3 takeaways for SaaS founders

Billing hostility outranks feature gaps. A broken refund policy churns loyal customers faster than a missing integration ever will. Audit your billing flow the way you audit your onboarding flow.
Forced tier inflation is a trust bomb. Solo users forced onto 2-seat plans, free users threatened with losing their own data, pro customers charged per-feature on top of pro pricing. These are not pricing strategies. They are trust accelerators in the wrong direction.
Public reviews are the cheapest churn data you will ever get. Your customers are already writing down why they left. Trustpilot, G2, Reddit, HN. Pull the last 60 days of reviews for your top 3 competitors into a tool and read the pattern. It will cost you an afternoon and it will outperform your last exit-survey analysis.

Try it on your own product

RetentionCheck runs the same analysis on any cancellation dataset in 30 seconds. Paste your exit survey rows, your support tickets, your Trustpilot reviews, your cancelled-sub feedback. You will get a Churn Health Score, grade A through F, 5 ranked churn drivers with severity and confidence, verbatim customer quotes backing each insight, and a priority action.

Free, no signup required: retentioncheck.com/try.

Sources

Related teardowns

Notion's Mid-Life Crisis (Grade D) · 60+ HN complaints, feature bloat
Why Teams Are Leaving Linear (Grade B) · Narrow, bounded churn (the opposite story)
Figma's 2025 Pricing Hike (Grade C) · +33% + Penpot surge
Asana and the SSO Tax (Grade D) · SSO gated behind most expensive tier

Brian Farello is the founder of RetentionCheck, an AI-powered churn analysis tool for SaaS teams. Try it free at retentioncheck.com/try.