Zoom tried to trap me

Ok, tell me if this has ever happened to you—

I asked Zoom to reduce the number of licenses on my account in May of last year.

They don’t have the option for me to do this myself on the website (SaaS my ass), but it’s fine. I’m not that fussy, I can send an email if that’s what they require.

But here’s the crazy thing — it’s now March, and they still haven’t reduced my licenses.

They just keep charging me for licenses I don’t need.

Here are their latest replies:

What should have taken 30 seconds has turned into an excruciating 10-month clown show. Zoom has made it deliberately impossible for me to downgrade.

Churn prevention strategy?

That’s not a strategy. That’s desperation. And it teaches you nothing.

What we learned from studying our own churn

At Lemon.io, we’ve had our own issues with churn. For a long time, we treated it as a black box — something that just happened, with no clear pattern.

But churn isn’t random. And when we started digging in, we discovered two big insights:

1. Not all customers are created equal.
   Some customers are just more likely to churn, no matter what you do. They don’t know what they want. They don’t have the budget. Or they’re in a chaotic phase of their business.
   

2. And some churn because we failed them.
   We moved too slowly, our devs didn’t meet expectations, or we didn’t make it easy enough to manage the engagement.
   

When we looked deeper, we started segmenting our customers by why they came to us in the first place. We found two dominant patterns:

• Short-term hires — scrappy founders trying to launch an MVP or build one quick feature.
  

• Long-term bets — companies looking for a reliable remote engineer to grow with them over time.
  

Guess which group had higher LTV, lower churn, and more upsell potential?

The long-term ones.

They didn’t just want to fill a seat — they wanted to build something. 

And we realized that if we could serve them better, churn would go down, and satisfaction would go up.

So we changed how we operate

We didn’t just tweak a few things. We rebuilt key parts of our process:

• Faster matching and better filtering tools — so we could get the right developer in front of the right customer quickly.
  

• AI-assisted screening tools — to help non-technical founders evaluate devs with more confidence.
  

• Clear feedback loops and performance tracking — so our developers had more ownership, and clients got more transparency.
  

• Smarter billing, flexible hours, and dev substitutions — to reduce friction on both sides.
  

And yes, we also made it easy to leave. But we did it in a way that helps us learn.

If a customer cancels, we ask why. We tag the reason, and follow up when it makes sense.

And sometimes, we win them back.

More importantly, every churn becomes a clue. It’s a chance to make the product better.

Zoom taught me what not to do

You don’t fight churn by trapping people. You fight churn by building something worth staying for.

And when someone does leave, you make it so damn graceful that they remember you fondly. Because a customer that churns today might come back tomorrow—

If you don’t treat them like a hostage.

–Aleksandr

P.S. — Do you have a painful cancellation story? Hit reply and tell me about it.

Catch you next Sunday!