SaaS Churn Teardowns

The first F-grade teardown in this series. Bending Spoons acquired, laid off 250 employees, doubled prices, slashed free tier to 50 notes. Exodus documented publicly.

$9B AI-coding tool. The June 2025 pricing restructure cut Pro capacity ~50%. CEO apologized on TechCrunch. AI support hallucinated a lockout policy that drove cancellations.

Investor pressure to AI-feature bloat to abandonment of the original audience. Hacker News calls it Notion's mid-life crisis.

March 2025 pricing +33% triggered the Penpot exodus. HN thread hit 632 points. Core product still best-in-class. Churn is trust damage, not quality.

The $27B company that threatened to delete 11 years of a teen non-profit's message history over a pricing dispute. Salesforce reversed it. Trust damage didn't reverse.

Random price increases, block-based seat pricing, and a daily cancellation-warning banner that every team member sees. Growth tactics teaching users to distrust.

SSO gated behind the most expensive tier. Tier creep for existing enterprise customers. Post-trial feature gating framed as bait-and-switch.

The rare SaaS outlier. Churned by users who outgrew it, not users who disliked it. Expanded free tier to unlimited team members in 2026.