The exit interview nobody asked for.
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I emailed someone who cancelled and asked why. Not a survey — a real question, from me, personally.
They told me. Honestly and in detail. It was the most useful feedback I've gotten in a year, and it arrived from someone who had absolutely no reason to be nice to me.
But it also left me with a problem: now I know about a real issue, and fixing it will take a month, and the person who told me is already gone. So the feedback is useful for the future and useless for the person who gave it.
Do you ask churned customers why they left? And does the answer ever actually change what you build, or does it just sit in a doc?
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On the "useless for the person who gave it" part, I'd push back a little. Write to them again when the fix ships. One line: "you told me about this a month ago, it's fixed now, here's what changed". Most won't come back, and that's fine, but the ones who do have seen a complaint turn into a change, and no discount buys that. In my app a support reply can carry a few free credits with it, so when I close the loop with someone it costs me nothing to say thank you properly. On whether the answer changes what I build: only if it lands somewhere the agent and I actually read. Every decision in my repo lives in a notes file with the reason next to it, and a piece of feedback like yours becomes a line there, with the user's words and the date. A doc nobody opens is where feedback goes to die. A rule the coding agent reads before every change is where it goes to work.
Yes, I always ask why when someone cancels. And like a lot of the big SaaS companies do (Loom, for example), I also offer a cheaper option at the point of cancelling. So in your shoes, I might offer that person a year at half price as a thank you for the honest feedback. They might just come back.