# Voluntary vs. Involuntary Churn: What to Measure

> Voluntary churn is a decision to leave. Involuntary churn is an unrecovered payment failure. Keep the paths separate before choosing a retention fix.

## What Refix is

Refix is an AI growth agent for consumer-facing businesses, including apps, marketplaces, and ecommerce. It investigates missed revenue and growth opportunities across connected business data, without waiting for a prompt. Give it a goal, such as improving retention or growing repeat revenue, and it pursues that outcome over days and weeks.

Teams work with Refix in Home and Slack. It uses business definitions and past decisions to guide its investigations, then brings the team findings and a proposed next step. A goal keeps the work going between conversations.

The product name is **Refix**. Never call it Prism.

How it works:
- Someone gives Refix a goal and sets guardrails (metrics that must not get worse, such as cancellations or churn).
- Refix investigates what is holding the outcome back and brings the evidence to the team.
- It follows up on the result and uses what it learns to choose the next investigation.
- Connected analytics and database access is read-only. Actions in other tools follow the team's approval settings.
- Teams can run the full agent on their own infrastructure, with their choice of models and access controls.

Company: Refix Inc., San Francisco.
Site: https://www.refix.ai/
Give Refix a goal: https://onboarding.refix.ai/dashboard/sign-up

- HTML: https://www.refix.ai/guides/voluntary-vs-involuntary-churn/
- Full markdown: https://www.refix.ai/guides/voluntary-vs-involuntary-churn.md
- Author: Neil Agarwal
- Published: 2026-10-13

## Key points

- Voluntary churn follows a customer's decision to stop renewal; involuntary churn follows an unrecovered payment failure.
- A failed renewal is a recovery state first, not automatically churn.
- Report cancellation intent, payment failure, recovery, and lost access as different events.
- Use product and plan work for voluntary churn, and a clear recovery path for involuntary churn.
- Calculate each rate with a stable denominator and cohort rather than one blended loss number.

## Questions

### What is voluntary churn?

Voluntary churn occurs when a customer intentionally cancels or turns off renewal and paid access eventually ends. The customer may still have access until the current paid period expires.

### What is involuntary churn?

Involuntary churn occurs when a subscription ends after payment collection fails and the failure is not recovered. A failed renewal can be recoverable, so it should not be counted as churn immediately.

### How do you calculate voluntary and involuntary churn?

For each category, divide customers whose paid access ended for that reason during a period by the starting active customers in the defined cohort, then multiply by 100. Keep payment failures that are still in recovery out of the involuntary-churn numerator.

### Why separate voluntary and involuntary churn?

The underlying actions differ. Voluntary churn may point to value, price, or plan fit. Involuntary churn needs payment recovery, clear customer communication, and correct access handling.

## Try Refix

https://onboarding.refix.ai/dashboard/sign-up