We canceled Notion last week after 7 years. I didn’t know until Amelia mentioned it in passing on The Agents podcast.
Seven years, zero support tickets, zero feature requests, zero escalations. We loved it enough that one of our teammates got invited to present at their user conference.
Notion did nothing wrong. We stopped needing it, or really, our agents had no use for it. And no customer health system on the market would have told them in time to do anything about it. It just didn’t have a place on our team when our agents run the staff meeting now.
How we got here #
I brought Notion into SaaStr around 2019, back when we had a bigger team. Everybody was using it, we had a designer who loved it and made it look great, and we moved our staff meetings off a Google Doc and into Notion. Every person had a dashboard they updated, and it felt very state of the art for B2B in 2019.
Over the years our usage narrowed. We stopped using it for most things and kept it for one, the Monday staff meeting, which was the whole job by the end.
Then Amelia built 10K, which started as a dashboard, became our AI head of marketing, and is now our AI VP of Revenue and Finance. We talk to it every day. At some point we started running the Monday staff meeting off 10K instead, because it already had the revenue numbers, the campaign data, the collections queue, and the pipeline. It became the source of truth and the record dashboard.
So Notion’s one remaining job disappeared, and it didn’t disappear to a competitor. It went to an agent we built ourselves.
Their own re-engagement email closed the loop #
Amelia hadn’t logged in for months. What actually triggered the cancellation was Notion’s email telling her she hadn’t logged in in a while. She read it and thought, you’re right, I need to go cancel this.
Those emails cut both ways, and I don’t think most B2B teams have priced that in. A re-engagement campaign assumes dormancy is a problem the customer wants solved. Sometimes dormancy is a decision the customer hasn’t gotten around to acting on yet, and your email is the reminder. I’m not saying stop sending them, but you should know which accounts you’re waking up.
The churn nobody is modeling. Or at least, many are hiding from #
We were not unhappy. There was no incident, no outage, no pricing dispute, no bad renewal conversation, and no competitor in the account. There was nothing for a CSM to save because there was nothing broken.
We were also not evaluating anyone. Nobody at Notion lost a bake-off, because there was no bake-off. The job Notion did for us got absorbed into a system we were building for entirely different reasons, and the absorption was gradual enough that I didn’t notice it had finished.
Usage decay would have shown up in a dashboard, but by the time our usage went to zero the replacement had already been running for months. The signal arrived well after the decision was irreversible, and there was no window where a save motion would have worked, because the alternative wasn’t a product they could have out-featured. It was our own agent, wired into our own data.
Account health models in B2B were built on the premise that unhappy customers tell you and quiet customers are fine. Agentic replacement inverts that. The quietest, happiest, lowest-touch accounts are now the most exposed, because low touch usually means the product does one narrow job, and one narrow job is exactly what an agent can take over.
The same blindness, pointed at us #
The mirror image happened at SaaStr in the same stretch, and it’s more embarrassing for us than the Notion story is for them.
When 10K got connected to Brex and QuickBooks as our AI VP of Finance, it found two customers still paying $300 a month for SaaStr Pro. That’s a learning management product we launched years ago to help CEOs train their teams, and some great companies used it. When the person running it left we couldn’t support it, so we stopped supporting it six years ago.
Two customers kept paying for six years on a product we had turned off. Nobody complained, nobody churned, and we didn’t know we were charging them. We assumed nobody was being charged at all. It took an agent with access to the billing data to surface it, which is the only reason we know now.
That’s the same failure as Notion’s running in the other direction, a working and quiet relationship that nobody was actually looking at.
The opposite mistake is worse (see, e.g., Adobe Marketo) #
Marketo made the inverse error on us this week, and it cost them a 10 year relationship.
Their argument for the renewal was that our usage was very high, so the best they could offer was waiving an 8% increase. High usage read to them as lock-in. Our usage was high because our list grew 50% this year and our revenue is up 40 something percent, which did not mean we loved them. It meant they were high enough on our priority list that someone at SaaStr was actively thinking about a better option, and once their API stopped working for our agents, high usage became the reason leaving was worth the pain rather than the reason to stay.
Low usage accounts are already gone. High usage accounts are either in love with you or actively shopping, and the dashboard cannot tell you which. That was survivable in 2019 and it isn’t now.
What we’d watch instead #
If I were running CS at a B2B company right now, I’d stop treating usage as the primary signal and start asking a different set of questions about every account. How many jobs do we do for this customer? An account that uses you for one narrow workflow is more exposed than an account with lower total usage across five workflows, whatever the seat count says. Single-job accounts get absorbed first.Is this customer building? If your champion is spending their week in Replit, Claude, or Lovable, they are one conversation away from an agent offering to do your job instead. That’s how our sponsor pages, our heat mapping, and our staff meeting all got rebuilt in the last month.Can our data get out and our agents get in? Marketo is deprecating the API we needed and we’d have blown through the rate limits in an hour, which made them unusable for us regardless of features. Agent-hostile architecture is a churn cause on its own now.Which quiet accounts are we about to wake up? Before the re-engagement campaign goes out, know which dormant accounts you’d rather leave asleep. Notion sent us a well-intentioned email and got a cancellation.
We were a great Notion customer for seven years, with a high NPS for many years, zero complaints, and a reference at their past user conference. And we left without a single conversation, because the job went somewhere else.